An article in today’s Diario Sur identified the impact that the shortage of trains, mainly between Malaga and Madrid, will have on Malaga road traffic this Holy Week and Easter. According to data published by the DGT, this Holy Week will be one of the busiest in recent years in terms of long-distance travel by private vehicle.
The Department currently estimates some 730,000 car journeys on the roads of Málaga during the ten days leading up to Easter Sunday. This represents 50,000 more cars, or a 7% increase on last year, putting our province in second place in Andalusia, behind Seville, where they have predicted 878,500.
But this increase in car traffic coincides with the reduction in capacity on high-speed trains due to the line closure following the Álora landslide. Ministry of Transport figures show that last year some 70,000 people arrived at María Zambrano station during Holy Week, at a time when there were 26 daily services in each direction. This year, there will be only eight daily services, combined with a bus service, offering at the most some 51,300 seats in both directions, meaning that a maximum of 25,650 passengers will be able to travel by rail from Madrid to Malaga… And that’s assuming all trains run at 100% capacity every day, which is unlikely.
Assuming that 2026 train arrivals would be similar to 2025’s, that leaves some 44,350 people who, if they come, will do so by car, which, with average car occupancy of 1.7 passengers, would equate to upwards of 26,000 more cars. While numbers might be reduced as some people might simply not come, this may be balanced out both by the 7% increase year on year in car traffic and by the fact that not all trains or buses will run at full capacity.
Read the article (in Spanish) here in Diario Sur.