From next Monday, October 6th, the free bus service to cover the route under construction on Metro Line 6 will be reinforced by new shuttles. Its implementation will come exactly one month after the beginning of the works in that section, a moment since when images of saturation and collapse have been registered and denounced in points such as Moncloa.
The university student body, which resumed classes in September, is one of the groups most affected by a substitute service that has proved insufficient to absorb the demand and daily needs of the line’s regular passengers.
With the new measure announced this Thursday by the President of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, the service will be reinforced with shuttle buses that will directly connect Moncloa with Ciudad Universitaria, without intermediate stops.
According to the Community of Madrid, “this special operation will be available on weekdays, between 7:00 and 21:30 hours, and will offer a frequency of five minutes during rush hour and 10 minutes during off-peak hours”.
This reinforcement service will be in operation “for as long as the renovation works on Metro Line 6 continue “, which are scheduled to be completed by December 31.
Why wasn’t the CIU section closed during the summer?
There are many people who have asked the question: why weren’t the cuts for works carried out in the reverse order? In other words, why wasn’t the CIU section closed during the summer, when there was no teaching activity.
In response to a user of X on this issue, Metro de Madrid claims that the work should have started “on the western arc, as it is the one with the highest passenger demand” and among the measures applied for this purpose , the line voltage on that section was modified.
As a result, the work was to continue immediately afterwards on the remaining section “to minimize the work time and avoid trains running at a different voltage on each section of the same line”, the company points out.
The Madrid subway, up to its limits
Anyone who uses the subway in the capital with some frequency will also have experienced that the carriages are much more crowded than usual, and even overcrowded. In statements made by the railway company to elDiario.es, the situation is attributed to circumstances such as works in different parts of the city, specific events such as the Fruit Attraction fair in Ifema and the closure of some of the network’s lines.
This has led to the recovery of figures such as the “pushers”, who ensure that trains travel at maximum capacity. A measure that many travelers have criticized in social networks, stating that the solution should be more frequent trains.
Some of the lines that are experiencing these large crowds are line 3, line 5 or line 10, which has left images like those that can be seen in the video above these words.