“Best Infrastructure 2019 Barcelona” prize.
Barcelona, October 14th 2020
Throughout the celebration of the 4th edition of “Infrastructure night”, organized by the Advisory Council on Infrastructure of Catalonia, presided by Francisco Gutierrez, which took place in the “Fomento del Trabajo” auditorium, Vallirana’s ring road in the B-24 highway was awarded the prize to the best infrastructure of 2019. The act included the welcome by Josep Sanchez Llibre, President of Fomento, and a final closure by Janet Sanz (second lieutenant mayor of Barcelona), Damià Calvet (advisor on territory and sustainability of the Generalitat) and Pedro Saura (the State’s Secretary of Transportation, Mobility and Urban Agenda).
The jury took into consideration the technical difficulties of the project, the incorporation of last-generation security measures into the tunnel, the project’s environmental integration and the great impact on the citizens of Vallirana, as the new ring road allows 19.000 vehicules a day, including 4.000 high-capacity trucks, to avoid the population center and have an alternative route.
The construction of the ring road began in 2004, but several setbacks slowed the progress of the construction, which was halted definitively in 2011 and wasn’t resumed until back in 2015. The budget rises to 167.390.000€, which must be added to the expropriation costs and both the technical aids in the writing of the project and the control and surveillance of the working site. The total number is around 176 million euros.
This new itinerary presents itself as an alternative of great capacity to the medium and long travel which was forced, until now, to go through the main street in Vallirana, the N-340, where the speed limit is 50km/h and there are several intersections (some of them include traffic lights), some crosswalks and frequent traffic retentions. .
Vallirana’s neighbors will be specially rewarded, as the new road variant has taken away a lot of this intense traffic from their streets, which greatly reduced the inconveniences that it caused, such as noise and pollution, and increases the safety of the N-340 as the chances of an accident are significantly reduced.
The total length of the road variant is 2.990 m, half of which go through the new Tunnel. The tunnel is formed by two tubes, one for each direction of circulation, of approximately 1.450m each. The tubes go below a residential part of Vallirana and they were the most important aspects of the work.
The section type of the tunnel is composed of two lanes of 3.5m, with maples both in the exterior and the interior (of 1m and 0.5m each) and a sidewalk of 0.75m. Among other installations, the tunnel has a double supply of energy, air quality sensors, emergency lighting, 3 evacuation galleries between tunnels adapted for people with reduced mobility and emergency vehicles, variable signals and radio communication systems. This will all be managed from a new control center, located near the west entrance to the tunnels.
Throughout construction, a perfect environmental integration through safety measures, environment restitution and landscape integration was achieved.
Even though the Best infrastructure 2019 Barcelona prize is unique, it also wanted to acknowledge each contributor, which are reduced to 4 contributions, each of them relative to the different steps necessary in the building of an infrastructure of said dimensions. In this 4th edition, the winners in each category were:
• Prize to Adiministration: Dirección General de Carreteras. Ministerio De Transportes, Movilidad y Agenada Urbana.
• Prize to Designers: META and AECOM INOCSA, S.L.
• Prize to Supervisors of the wotrks: BAC Engineering Consultancy Group, S.L. and Pigra Engineering, S.L.
• Prize to Construction Company: FCC Construcción, S.A.