The Health Minister was pleased today in Vila Nova de Gaia with the assurance given by the Porto Metro administration that the Yellow Line, which passes through Santos Silva Hospital, will be in operation in the beginning of 2024.
During a visit to the metro works near Gaia Hospital, Manuel Pizarro, accompanied by the president of Porto Metropolitan Area, Eduardo Vítor Rodrigues, the president of Metro do Porto, Tiago Braga, and the president of Vila Nova de Gaia/Espinho Hospital Center, Rui Guimarães, said to journalists that the Porto metro works “continue at a good pace” and that “they will be operational in January 2024, allowing hundreds of thousands of people, users and professionals, to access Gaia Hospital in much better conditions”.
“This extension of the Oporto Metro’s Yellow Line, an absolutely impressive operation from an engineering point of view, was confirmed to me today that we will have metro operating on this line up to Vila Nova de Gaia hospital already in the first quarter of next year,” he said.
“This hospital (…) is very strained by the difficulty of access, since people have only public transportation by bus or by their own car. These are very different conditions from what they will have when the metro arrives here with a frequency of one metro every seven minutes and an average waiting time of less than three and a half minutes,” said the Health Minister.
People will now have what is “a modern mobility system, that is, every time the subway stops on the surface, the street light turns green, giving priority to pedestrians.
“With this Yellow Line up to Vila d’Este and the Pink Line under construction in Oporto we will have all the hospitals in the Greater Oporto area connected by the metro system. We already have the Hospital de S. João and the Hospital de Matosinhos, we will now have the Hospital de Gaia and, a few months later, the Hospital de Santo António”, stressed Manuel Pizarro.
The Ministry of Environment confirmed, in March, that the cost of the works on the Pink and Yellow lines of the Porto Metro increased by 29% and 30%, respectively, about 84 million euros in total.
The initial cost of the contracts amounted to 98.9 million euros on the Yellow Line and increased by almost 30 million, and 189 million euros on the Pink Line (São Bento – Casa da Música, in Porto), where costs increased by about 54 million euros.
Besides the construction work, the total investment in the two projects is around 407 million Euros, including expropriations, projects, supervision, equipment, and support systems for the operation.
