Overcrowded but not due to tourists

Who’s truly at fault?

The motorway by Fan Shopping Centre showing a traffic jam. | R.L.

TW
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What are we going to do? Build more roads, add more lanes to existing ones or try and push the car off the road? These are the options and something needs to be done. A car journey from Santa Ponsa to Palma took 50 minutes this week because of gridlock on the motorway and then along the Paseo Maritimo in Palma....and the summer season hasn’t started yet.

It is easy to blame tourists and their hire cars but they are not the cause of the problem; the simple truth is that there are too many cars on the road owned and driven by the local population. We are living in a region of Spain where there is the four-car family. With the Spanish government thinking of many cunning ways to tax people, why don’t they tax families who have more than one vehicle?

The simple truth is that the Balearics has infrastructure which was designed for a resident population of 700,000 and now the population stands at one million. This is one of the chief reasons for the so-called saturation.

Yes, Mallorca is overcrowded during the summer but it is a mixture of more residents and tourists. The truth is that more roads will have to be built, more hospitals and schools, not because of tourists but because of a larger resident population. Thankfully cash from tourism will pay for them.