Article published by José Alberto León Alonso in El Día on 09/27/2015.
The headline of my article coincides with that of the front page of this newspaper on September 23, when an accident early in the morning caused queues of about 15 kilometers on the Tenerife North Highway. The curious thing is to “dive” on the Internet looking for the details of this news to find no less than 7,100 results, but not commenting on the same accident, no. These are similar news on different days. The same situation is repeated every time an accident occurs early in the morning, given the saturated traffic on the TF-5 at that time. And what is not news is the daily morning traffic jam that forms on weekdays on the same road, and which delays between thirty and sixty minutes the entry into the metropolitan area of users who head towards it from the north between seven and nine in the morning.
One of the reasons why the TF-5 is saturated early in the morning is that users who live between Los Realejos and Tacoronte and who want to go to the south of the island for work reasons are forced to travel first to the metropolitan area on that road and then take the Southern Highway, given that the trip to the north is longer (in time), tiring and dangerous due to the lack of a road in good condition between El Tanque and Santiago del Teide. At Corporación 5 we have first-hand knowledge of the problems caused by the absence of the aforementioned route, what is known as the closure of the Island Ring, since the Tenerife Cabildo commissioned us in 2013 to carry out a cost-benefit analysis of it, calculating the social profitability of its construction, to determine if it was socially advisable to undertake the aforementioned work. In a country like ours, it is rare that the social usefulness of public investments is technically analyzed, since there is no awareness that investment in some projects is made at the expense of others (what in economics is known as opportunity cost), since money is not infinite, and that the reasonable thing to do is to do it in the most profitable projects from a social point of view, with a serious and rigorous study of the different alternatives to know which is the best. In “serious” countries such as the United States, France and the United Kingdom, these evaluations are mandatory, but not in Spain. A good cost-benefit analysis not only shows the benefits of each project and discovers its defects, which can be corrected and improved before making the investment, but also makes transparent and objective the way investments are made and who wins and loses with each action.
Our study shows great savings in time and distance traveled for users traveling between the north and south, which are shown in the attached table. But in this case, the savings for the citizen are not limited to those who travel from the north to the south, but also for those of us who travel during rush hour from the north of the island to Santa Cruz or La Laguna. The closure of the Insular Ring would reduce traffic between Tacoronte and La Laguna by more than 10%, by diverting traffic from north to south along the new road. This 10% reduction means that the traffic that circulates at eight in the morning on the TF-5 would be similar to that which now circulates on that road at eleven in the morning, that is, dense traffic but without traffic jams, so that it would indirectly solve (at least temporarily) the traffic collapse at rush hour.
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Our study on the closure of the Island Ring concluded that it was a socially profitable investment, since its construction cost (382 million euros) was more than offset by social savings valued at 269 million euros annually, so that the investment was recovered in just over a year and a half after commissioning. Few public projects obtain such a social profitability, to the point that we have never analyzed one more socially profitable than this one. The question then would be why has it not been done before? Were there other better investments? The truth is that we do not know, since cost-benefit analyzes of investments are not carried out frequently enough.
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