After long negotiations, the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament have reached an agreement at the end of May on the proposals to transform the existing patchwork of railways, roads, airports and waterways into a unified transport network (TEN-T).
The agreement sets a core transport network to be established by 2030 to act as the backbone for transportation within the Single Market. Transport financing under the Connecting Europe Facility (for the period 2014–2020) will also focus on this core transport network, filling in cross-border missing links, removing bottlenecks and making the network smarter.
The EUR 31.7 Billion granted to transport within the Connecting Europe Facility will serve in practice as “initial capital” to stimulate additional investments from the member states in order to finalize the difficult cross-border connections and links which would probably not be developed otherwise. Each EUR 1 Million spent in Europe will generate EUR 5 Million from the governments of the member states and EUR 20 Million from the private sector. To support the financing from the Connecting Europe Facility, the Commission also adopted the terms of the “Project Bonds” Europe 2020 Initiative (bonds for the financing of projects) which will represent one of the instruments for dividing the risk that the Connecting Europe Facility could rely on in order to attract private capital for the financing of projects. The pilot phase will begin in 2013.
The new core TEN-T network will be supported by a comprehensive network of routes, feeding into the core network at regional and national level. This will largely be financed by Member States, with some EU transport and regional funding possibilities, including with new innovative financing instruments. The aim is to ensure that progressively, and by 2050, the great majority of Europe’s citizens and businesses will be no more than 30 minutes’ travel time from this comprehensive network.
“This is a historic agreement to create a powerful European transport network across 28 Member States. Transport is vital to the European economy, without good connections Europe will not grow or prosper. This agreement will connect East with West and replace today’s transport patchwork with a network that is genuinely European.
This is a major step towards building a new transport network that will be the backbone to boost growth and competitiveness in Europe’s Single Market”, declared the European Commissioner for Transport, Siim Kallas.
The new regulation provides for deadlines to make sure that all projects contributing to the core transport network are implemented as a priority. It sets standards to ensure that trains, ships, planes, trucks and cars can use the transport infrastructure safely and without any technical problem. The core network is to be completed by 2030.
For instance, by 2030 the core railway network will be equipped with the European ERTMS signalling system, allowing for easy and safe cross-border train operations. The new policy focuses on the most important elements: cross-border projects, interoperability and intermodality between different transport modes. The European coordinators will support the member states and the project promoters so as to obtain the best possible return of investments.
An important provision included in the new TEN-T guidelines stipulates that the operators of freight terminals should make sure that all cargo terminals are open to all transport operators while the operators of logistics platforms provide at least one open terminal to all railway freight transport operators.
The operators of cargo terminals and those of logistics platforms will have to provide this type of access without discrimination and with transparent tariffs.
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