It’s commonplace: you take the car, you enter a tunnel on the M-30, a gap in space-time opens up if you don’t have the route memorized and you can appear in Parla or Príncipe Pío. But that will change in 2025.
Madrid City Council has announced an ambitious project to provide GPS coverage for the tunnels of the M-30, the capital’s busiest ring road. This system will allow precise navigation in these covered stretches, something that until now was not possible due to the lack of satellite visibility inside the tunnels. According to municipal sources told the newspaper El Confidencial, the system is expected to be operational in the spring of 2025.
The works in the M30 tunnels
The new geopositioning system is based on the installation of electronic beacons with Bluetooth technology distributed along the tunnels. These beacons will be placed on the sides of the tunnels, on the cable trays, with aluminum brackets fixing them in place. They will be spaced between 20 and 40 meters apart to ensure complete coverage along the entire subway route.
The project, with a base budget of 223,120 euros, seeks to solve a structural problem affecting the current GPS repeater infrastructure, which can only offer fixed positions linked to external antennas.
This technical deficiency not only prevents smooth navigation, but also, according to the City Council’s Works and Equipment Delegate, Paloma García Romero, “confuses drivers and compromises safety“. The complexity of the environment, with tunnels without adequate visibility for satellite systems, has represented a major challenge for the authorities.
Despite the magnitude of the project, the City Council assures that the work will not interfere with daily traffic in the tunnels, which will avoid inconvenience to drivers.