The recent agreement between the European Commission, the Council and the European Parliament sets the foundation of establishing the core transport network which should become effective by 2030. In turn, the core network represents the “backbone” of European transport 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 trans-European transport network has to ensure efficient multi-modality in order to allow better modal choices.
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). There have been enough fears about the financing of the TEN-T projects; the fears have gone on 27 June when the European Parliament and the Council reached an agreement on the Connecting Europe Facility and the new European Fund worth EUR 30 Billion was dedicated to the financing of joint interest projects on infrastructure for trans-European transport network, energy and telecommunications.
“In order to foster growth and employment, to strengthen its role in a globalised world, Europe needs strong and interconnected infrastructures in the fields of transport, energy and telecommunications. This is the main aim of the CEF, which focuses funding on projects with a European added value, contributing to deepen European integration. “I therefore deeply regret that governments do not strongly support this fund, since they proposed to drastically reduce its financial envelope”, said co-rapporteur Dominique Riquet (France).
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 30 Billion granted to transport within the “Connecting Europe Facility” (for 2014-2020) 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 gene-rate 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. As regards the establishment of the core network corridors, proper attention has to be paid to the railway freight transport corridors established under Regulation 913/2010. According to the TEN-T guidelines, the operators of freight terminals will ensure that all freight terminals are opened to all transport operators and logistics platform terminals provide at least one terminal open to all operators. The core network has to reflect the evolution of the traffic demand and the need for multimodal transport.
Share on:
