IL accuses Government of lack of political will to run railroad

The president of the Liberal Initiative (IL), Rui Rocha, considered today that there is a “lack of political will” to invest in the railroad and accused the Government of making “many promises” with “poor implementation”.

“There is no political will to implement a railway plan that serves the country and that also serves the interior regions”, he said, in Bragança, where the Liberal Route initiative dedicated to the railway ended today, with a visit to the Railway Museum and a colloquium About the subject.

Bragança has not had a train for more than 30 years and the president of IL defended that “the district capitals that today are not served by rail connection, namely Bragança, Vila Real and Viseu, will now have this connection”.

“The railroad must be a bet for the country and it must also be a bet in these regions”, he emphasized, to then criticize the National Railway Plan presented by the Government, which contemplates these connections, but about which the president of IL understands “there are already signs that it may be being dropped”.

“There are solutions, for example in the Algarve, of light rail that point to an incompatibility with what is the solution presented in recent times by the Government. The signs are all that promises are many, but then the implementation is always very poor, far short of what the promises are, “he said.

Before discussing concrete solutions for each territory, Rui Rocha argues that it is first necessary to have “the political conviction that this is fundamental and Portugal needs railways, Portugal needs trains”.

He considered that what is observed “is that the investment plans that the Government presents in terms of the railway are systematically not complied with”.

“The 2020 railway plan has, at the moment, about 15% of its execution completed, it was a plan that should have already been implemented, about 30% of that plan will no longer be executed and everything else will be executed with a long delay” , pointed.

The president of IL considered that “a good image of the country itself” is the decade-long impasse with the Tua Mobility Plan, which foresees the return of the train to about 30 kilometers from the deactivated Tua line, in Trás-os- Hills.

“There is an understanding, there are negotiated counterparts, but then a decade goes by and they do not get off the ground because the issue is administrative and bureaucratic, no one agrees on the responsibility they have for the structure and this causes the populations to be deprived of a counterpart because no one understands each other”, he concluded.

“It’s a real picture of what the country’s problems are, bureaucracy, lack of responsibility, sometimes it seems that things are done in a loose way so that nobody understands each other afterwards,” he added.

Rui Rocha also commented on today’s general strike called by the CGTP to reiterate that the solution to the problem of rising cost of living cannot be resolved with measures such as price fixing.

IL defends that the bet should be on the tax issue and that “the Portuguese should have more money in their pockets” and that the “thousands that the State is raising” should be distributed through the reduction of taxes such as IRS and VAT .