Barcelona's Not-At-All Sexy But Highly Effective Scheme to Cut Emissions

Barcelona’s newest project to get freight traffic off of its roads has a beautiful simplicity to it. Starting in 2018, the city’s port will have a new rail link connected directly to a greatly improved Mediterranean rail corridor.

This rail corridor will allow shipping containers to be transported via transit straight from the port all the way to their final destinations, whether in Spain, Southern France or yet further afield. In doing so, the link will replace an impossibly clunky and under-used rail connection, one that runs on a different gauge to the rest of the rail network and requires trains to pass through nine level crossings just to get to the main transfer terminal. As infrastructure projects go, this new link is perhaps not the most exciting ever hatched—it’s a special kind of person whose heart is set aflutter by talk of gauge changes. Still, the project’s effect could nonetheless be huge.