You no longer have an excuse if you get lost in the M-30 tunnels in Madrid due to poor coverage

The famous M-30 is the main ring road of Madrid. An extensive network of roads that surrounds the entire Spanish capital and which is, if you didn't know, the most trafficked road of its kind in our country. Although in the city we also have the M-40 or the "incomplete" M-50, nothing matches the M-30 in importance.

According to data from the City Council of Madrid, half a million users travel on it every day, who have to face, if they drive through the southern area, the also famous and feared tunnels of the M-30, where it is very easy for your mobile phone and your car radio to lose signal.

Those of us who frequently drive on it already have memorized a good part of the sections of this road, but those who do not have to deal with its complexity and an added problem: the lack of coverage for applications like Google Maps or Waze to function properly. Until now.

1,600 Bluetooth beacons integrated into the M-30

The Madrid City Council has just announced the launch of a series of devices that will allow guided navigation and enable drivers to drive safely, smoothly, and with coverage when using these two applications that we use with navigators.

Madrid Calle 30, the company responsible for the management, operation, conservation, and maintenance of the M-30, has invested 141,000 euros to install a total of 1,600 beacons along 48 kilometers in the underground sections of the road.

This is how the Bluetooth beacons of the Madrid M-30 work, in video.

It is no small feat, as the M-30 is considered one of the longest underground infrastructures in the world within a city. These beacons, which emit a Bluetooth signal that will allow apps to provide accurate information about their location, have been installed with the collaboration of Waze and Google.

They are "low-power devices that run on batteries and emit a constant and unidirectional Bluetooth signal," explains the mobility area of the Madrid City Council in a press release, which also reveals that these same beacons will also be installed in the 38 urban tunnels throughout the city, adding another 1,100 additional devices very soon.

The people responsible for their installation claim to have faced a real technological challenge, as the Madrid M-30 has 21 entrances and 26 exits in its extensive network of tunnels, which are even overlapping.

What you need to do to take advantage of these beacons

The first thing every driver must do to benefit from this improvement in the M-30 tunnels is, first, download the relevant application, available for both Android and iOS. Then, you will need to follow a series of steps depending on which one you want to use.

In the case of Waze, you only need to have Bluetooth activated on your mobile phone. In contrast, in Google Maps, in addition to this, you must have previously activated the "Bluetooth tunnel beacons" option that appears in the "Navigation" settings of the application.