The promoters of the motorway project between Toulouse and Castres, who have been fighting for years to set up this road link, are not giving up when a major demonstration is planned for this Saturday, April 22. They recall, like the president of Ceser, Jean-Louis Chauzy, the importance of completing this dossier.
Thirty years that Castres has been waiting for its highway. Albi obtained it in 1992 with the A68. Today the South Tarn around Castres-Mazamet, the fourth industrial center of Occitanie, is the only economic area of more than 100,000 inhabitants without a motorway or TGV service in France. “We have been campaigning for thirty years for the medium-sized towns of the former Midi-Pyrénées to be connected by safe 2×2 lanes to the regional capital of Toulouse”, recalls Jean-Louis Chauzy, the president of Ceser *, an assembly which voted for an opinion in this sense as of December 15, 2009.
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Montauban, Tarbes, Cahors, Foix, Rodez, soon Auch… all the prefectures and major cities have come out of isolation by connecting to Toulouse by motorway “because 80% of trips are made by our fellow citizens by car, slips the former CFDT trade unionist. The lasting attractiveness of all our territories requires republican equity”.
For the president of the region, these infrastructures respond well to the need to open up living areas: “Far from Paris, the Occitanie region is one of the most isolated in France. The regional territory suffers from a significant deficit in transport infrastructure to allow the movement in good conditions of more than six million inhabitants”, reacted Carole Delga after opponents of the A69 covered the Regional Council with paint.
Avoid “monstropolisation”
Because how to avoid “monstropolization”, that is to say the economic and urban concentration only in Toulouse, without tools for the development of the rural territory? When he calls for “a dialogue between the capital metropolis and the peri-urban or rural areas that surround it”, Jean-Luc Moudenc, mayor of Toulouse and president of Toulouse Métropole wants to play on complementarities with medium-sized cities and territories such as with the Portes de Gascogne territorial and rural balance center (PETR).
To achieve this, road links in particular are decisive. Carole Delga does not say anything else by guaranteeing that the A69 “must also contribute to avoiding the concentration of services, jobs and wealth in the Metropolises for the benefit of other territories often poorly endowed or forgotten”.
Saving travel time on the journey estimated at between 15 to 25 minutes is not the motivation for the launch of the A69. It is a simple consequence of the opening up allowed by the motorway. “When Manuel Bompard des Insoumis or Christophe Cassou, researcher at the CNRS say they are opposed to the A69, those who already have the metro, the airport, the motorways… they simply want to prevent the rural world from developing”, thunders Jean- Louis Chauzy.