The left is in disarray. But more seriously there is this idea that day-to-day opposition on issues during the entire 4-year term is not as important as parachuting the right face into the candidacy a couple of months before the election, with disastrous consequences.
Not having been in Madrid for a long time, I cannot really answer you with hard data about frequency of service, just hearsay. here you can see the "average interval between trains", broken down by line and time/weekday within each line. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
Administration is all top-down. I touched briefly on that here.
I really should investigate this more. The Spanish wikipedia claims the function of District Municipal Boards is to organize citizens' participation, but I have never seen this happen. Granted, I may not have been paying attention. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
What can you say about the accident in the Valencia Metro last year? The local and regional governments were not too keen on a public investigation, and the unions claimed they had complained about problems around the stretch of track where the accident happened. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
According to the scientific police [forensics] in the automatic train control system of the Siemens ZSI-27 unit involved in the accident, from June 20 to July 3 of 2004 "one can repeatedly read the activation of the emergency braking because of excess speed". Most often this happens for "exceeding the established speed by 9 to 10 Km/h", but in others this happens "without reaching this limit". Therefore, the General Directorate of the POlice concludes that "this emergency braking has been activated on occasion without exceeding the limiting speed, which might lead to questioning the system's precision". The report continues by explaining that "it will be possible to discard the fainting of the driver", because the automatic mechanism of the train, denominated "dead man", hasn't been activated as can be gleaned from the data obtained from the Event Recording Box Teloc 2200, also known as black box.
Say,
On the other hand, Madrid used to have more train stations. "Norte" (in the West of the town) is now a shopping centre at Principe Pio. That could have been used for a triangular tunnel linking it to Nuevos Ministerios and Atocha. Can the last politician to go out the revolving door please turn the lights off?
