The residents of Avenida Marítima in Arrecife have started collecting signatures to request greater traffic control from the City Council, which in recent years has increased "with hardly any surveillance or control", causing "unbearable" noise and environmental pollution.
Residents report that in the last three years vehicles have been circulating "every day of the week and 24 hours a day", and that, due to the lack of control, the majority "do not respect the speed limit" (set at 20 kilometers/hour), even more so at night, when they "greatly exceed that figure".
As a result, the noise and environmental pollution is "difficult to bear", and, along with that, there is the "increasing" possibility of a "serious" accident due to the proximity of the playground, the pedestrian area of Calle Real, terraces, or the presence of cyclists or scooters.
"The City Council has failed to comply with the regulations"
In October 2019, the mayor of Arrecife, Astrid Pérez, authorized road traffic again on Avenida de Arrecife, through a decree that aimed to "relaunch the center of the capital of Lanzarote" and "commercial and economic reactivation".
At that time, it was stated that traffic would only be allowed in the Playa del Reducto-Puente de las Bolas direction, "which is where nearly 80% of the daily traffic volume is generated in the accesses to the capital".
Now, three years later, residents consider the measure to be "ineffective" for the objective it pursued, having generated other "undesirable but foreseeable" effects, since, in their opinion, the City Council has "failed in its duties" and has "disregarded" its own regulations, since the massive circulation of vehicles is allowed in the opposite direction to that allowed, being in practice, the Avenue a road "of two directions, without restrictions".
Neighborhood requests
Faced with this situation, the community of residents of Avenida Marítima requests the City Council to eliminate road traffic again on the road, allowing it only for public service.
Likewise, if they do not opt for this decision, they propose that surveillance be reinforced and traffic regulations be enforced, in order to reduce its volume and speed, and that radars be installed to control this last point.
Regarding the environmental issue, they ask that this road be included as one of the projects of the Low Emission Zone, based on the law on climate change and energy transition, approved by the Government of Spain, which "obliges all Spanish municipalities of more than 50,000 inhabitants to have these zones from January 1, 2023", as the residents have pointed out.
