The new European Union infrastructure policy will put in place a powerful European transport network across all 28 member states to promote economic growth and competitiveness. It will connect East with West and replace today’s transport patchwork with a network that is genuinely European.
The new EU infrastructure policy triples EU financing to EUR 26 Billion for transport for the period 2014–2020. At the same time it refocuses transport financing on a tightly defined new core network. The core network will form the backbone for transportation in Europe’s single market. It will remove bottlenecks, upgrade infrastructure and streamline cross border transport operations for passengers and businesses throughout the EU. Its implementation will be pushed ahead by the setting up of nine major transport corridors that will bring together member states and stakeholders and will allow concentrating tight resources and achieving results.
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. 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 mi-nutes’ travel time from this comprehensive network.
Freight transport is expected to grow by 80% by 2050, and passenger transport by more than 50%.
But why has in fact a new reorientation of the infrastructure and investment strategy been necessary?
In practice there are five main problem areas which need to be tackled at EU level. First of all, missing links, in particular at cross-border sections, are a major obstacle to the free movement of goods and passengers within and between the Member States and with its neighbours. Secondly, there is a considerable disparity in quality and availability of infrastructure between and within the member states. Thirdly, the transport infrastructure between the transport modes is fragmented. As regards making multi-modal connections, many of Europe’s freight terminals, passenger stations, inland ports, maritime ports, airports and urban nodes are not up to the task. Since these nodes lack multi-modal capacity, the potential of multi-modal transport and its ability to remove infrastructure bottlenecks and to bridge missing links is insufficiently exploited. On the other hand, investments in transport infrastructure should contri-bute to achieve the goals of reduction of greenhouse gas emissions in transport by 60% by 2050. Last but not least, member states still maintain different operational rules and requirements, in particular in the field of interoperability, which significantly add to the transport infrastructure barriers and bottlenecks.
The core network will connect 94 main European ports with rail and road links, 38 key airports with rail connections into major cities, 15,000 km of railway line upgraded to high speed and 35 cross border projects to reduce bottlenecks.
New guidelines to accelerate investments
A major innovation on the new TEN-T guidelines is the introduction of nine implementing corridors on the core network. They are there to help implement the development of the core network. Each corridor must include three transport modes, three Member States and 2 cross-border sections.
In fact, these corridors are not new; they shape and define the core network of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T); but an improved redefinition of this core network was necessary to speed up infrastructure investments. The projects of the core network identified as priority for EU financing in the coming programming period (2014-2020) have been set in conformity with the “Connecting Europe” Facility.
Thus, the European Union has elaborated a short description of the nine corridors.
The Baltic-Adriatic Corridor is one of the most important trans-European road and railway axes. It comprises important railway projects such as Semmering base tunnel and Koralm railway in Austria and cross-border sections between Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
The North Sea-Baltic Corridor connects the ports of the Eastern shore of the Baltic Sea with the ports of the North Sea. The most important project is “Rail Baltic”, a European standard gauge railway between Tallinn, Riga, Kaunas and North-Eastern Poland.
The Mediterranean Corridor links the Iberian Peninsula with the Hungarian-Ukrainian border. Key railway projects along this corridor are the links Lyon–Turin and the section Venice–Ljubljana.
The Orient/East-Med Corridor connects the maritime interfaces of the North, Baltic, Black and Mediterranean Seas, optimising the use of the ports concerned and the related Motorways of the Sea. Including Elbe as inland waterway, it will improve the multimodal connections between Northern Germany, the Czech Republic, the Pannonian region and Southeast Europe. Romania is part of this corridor.
The Scandinavian-Mediterranean Corridor is a crucial north-south axis for the European economy. The most important projects in this corridor are the fixed Fehmarnbelt crossing and Brenner base tunnel, including their access routes.
The Rhine-Alpine Corridor constitutes one of the busiest freight routes of Europe. This multimodal corridor includes the Rhine as inland waterway. Key projects are the base tunnels, partly already completed, in Switzerland and their access routes in Germany and Italy.
The Atlantic Corridor links the Western part of the Iberian Peninsula and the ports of Le Havre and Rouen to Paris and further to Mannheim/Strasbourg, with high speed rail lines and parallel conventional ones.
The North Sea-Mediterranean Corridor stretches from Ireland and the north of UK through the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg to the Mediterranean Sea in the south of France. This is also a multimodal corridor.
The Rhine-Danube Corridor, with the Main and Danube waterway as its backbone, connects the central regions around Strasbourg and Frankfurt via Southern Germany to Vienna, Bratislava, Budapest, Bucharest and finally the Black Sea, with an important branch from Munich to Prague, Zilina, Kosice and the Ukrainian border. The Pan-European Corridor IV, which crosses Romania, is part of the Rhine-Danube Corridor.
Funds will triple in the next programming period
The Connecting Europe Facility makes available for transport infrastructure EUR 26 Billion for the next financial period 2014–2020, this triples the financing currently available. 80 to 85% of this money will be used to support especially priority projects along the nine implementing corridors on the core network. Funding will also be available for a limited number of other sections projects of high European added value on the core network.
EUR 11 Billion of the EUR 26 Billion will be allocated from the Cohesion Fund.
“Romania will be able to access EUR 1.2 Billion of the EUR 11.3 Billion for developing important railway projects, including cross-border connections and bottlenecks projects. Romania should make sure it fills in the missing links for both the domestic and the border networks”, underlined Stephane Ouaki, Head of Unit, Connecting Europe – Infrastructure investments strategies, DG MOVE, during the Railway Days Summit – “Greener and more efficient railways in WBSA”, organised by Club Feroviar and the Romanian Railway Industry Association (AIF) in October in Bucharest.
Ouaki also said there will be Specific Programme Support Actions for Cohesion member states experiencing difficulties in proposing projects. The projects considered eligible for financing include the nine freight corridors and other important projects referring to new railway cross-border sections.
Considerable progress has been achieved in improving transport connections between Western and Eastern Europe. As of recently, the TEN-T network includes east-west connections that were completely or partially missing or restricted to specific transport modes.
However, within EU, there is a major discrepancy regarding the quality and availability of infrastructure (bottlenecks) in member states and inside them. It will be mostly necessary to improve the east-west connections by creating new transport infrastructures and/or by maintaining, rehabilitating or upgrading the existing infrastructure.
At present, the interest centre moved from individual projects to creating a core network of strategic corridors that will connect the east and west and all the corners of a vast geographical surface stretching from Portugal up to Finland and from the coast of Scotland to the Black Sea coast.
According to the European Commission, it will be up to the Member States to submit detailed proposals to the Commission and on that basis funding will be allocated. This should happen as of early 2014. The precise level of EU funding available also depends on the details for the national proposals. Overall, the EU contribution to a major transport infrastructure development will normally be around 20% of the investment costs for any 7-year budget period. Support for individual studies can be up to 50 % and for studies and construction work in the case of cross-border projects up to 40%. The rest is from member states, regional authorities or possibly private investors. However, the European Commission also says that for certain ITS projects, like ERTMS, higher co-financing of up to 50% can be made available to support Member States making the transition.
[ by Elena Ilie ]Share on:
