Tallinn, 17/10/3013 (Agence Europe) - Nine major corridors will act as a backbone for transport in Europe and will receive funding for transport infrastructure for the period 2014-2020 worth €26 billion (at current prices) through the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF). The maps for this new Trans-European Transport (TEN-T) backbone are crucial to all candidates for European co-financing and were presented on Thursday 17 October in Tallinn by European Commissioner Siim Kallas. The commissioner explained that, “We have shifted the focus from individual projects onto a core network of strategic corridors that will join East and West and all corners of a vast geographical area - from Portugal to Finland, from the coast of Scotland to the shores of the Black Sea.”.
These nine corridors make up the new core network and are expected to be completed by 2030. The core network will help improve connections in Europe, with particular attention to cross-border connections between East and West and getting rid of bottlenecks. There will therefore be two North-South, three East-West and four diagonal (see other article) corridors in which there will be 94 main European ports, 38 key airports, 15,000 km of railway line upgraded to high speed and 35 cross-border projects.
The maps will now provide the reference points for projects selected for European Union co-funding over the next seven years. The €26 billion in CEF (of which 11 billion will come from Cohesion Funds) will theoretically be available as from 1 January next year. This is three times as much money as that available in the current financial programming period. Nonetheless, the first call for tenders will not be launched until around March and the results of the selection will not be revealed until autumn 2014.
Created by the TEN-T European Agency, co-financed projects will be managed by way of a platform for each corridor that brings together all the different stakeholders. They will be supervised by a coordinator, as stipulated in the new European regulation on TEN-T orientations adopted this year. In order for a project to be selected it is imperative that it meets the high demands of having the necessary experience and respect for the environment as well as, above all, being eligible for priority funding as outlined in the annexes to the Connecting Europe Facility. Co-funding rates for selected projects will be 20% for infrastructure development projects, 40% for cross-border projects and 50% for studies carried out. This can even rise to 85% for cohesion countries.
Commissioner Siim Kallas's vanguard is the East-West connections in Europe because they intend to provide added European value to the Trans-European Network for Transport. As part of the same perspective, almost half of the CEF transport envelope (€11.3 billion from Cohesion Funds) will be allocated to projects in cohesion countries. The Commissioner explained that, “It's time to get Europe better connected - especially its remoter regions, which always benefit from better links to the geographic centre”. (MD/transl.fl)