The ministers responsible for transport in the Member States and third countries are calling for additional resources to strengthen the resilience and efficiency of transport systems, emphasised Georges Gilkinet, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Minister for Mobility, at the conference following the informal meeting of European transport ministers in Brussels on Thursday 4 April.
He believes that investment in transport infrastructure, particularly rail infrastructure, is not only “necessary”, but that “not doing so would be more expensive”. “The almost unanimous position of the EU Transport Council is to ask the Member States to agree to better finance the European project, either through their own funding or through additional contributions”, he said.
“There is a decision to be made within the Commission as to what resources should be allocated”, he added. This position echoes the campaign launched 2 days earlier by 44 European organisations to urge the Council of the European Union and the European Parliament to increase the budget for the ‘Connecting Europe Facility’ (CEF) for transport during the next revision of the EU’s multiannual financial framework (see EUROPE 13382/6).
“It is a bit frustrating to see, when the budget comes, that you see cuts, which happened at the last exercise”, lamented Adina Vălean, the European Commissioner for Transport. “All the projects we had in the last call for projects were so many times oversubscribed, this shows there is a need for this financial instrument, it is working properly and has this unique scheme [which] is also attracting private investment through co-financing”, she emphasised.
Ms Vălean felt that the next policy cycle should focus on investment, new ways of attracting private investment, implementing policies and consolidating them, evaluating how they are working and adjusting them to achieve results.
For Mr Gilkinet, it’s a question of commitment to decarbonising mobility, the economic sector that has seen the least progress in this area in recent years, because innovation is not keeping pace with growing demand. “Technology can and must help us, but we need to achieve a modal shift towards modes of transport that have less impact in terms of CO2”, he said.
He spoke of the development of active mobility, initiated in the ‘European Declaration on Cycling’ signed the previous day (see EUROPE 13383/8). The European ministers also discussed intermodality and rail at length (see other news) and expressed their desire to “make rail transport the backbone of European mobility”. (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)