Brussels, 12/03/2003 (Agence Europe) - Luciano Caveri (Liberal, Italy), President of the European Parliament's Transport Commission, has confirmed in a press release that the local and regional authorities of Rhone-Alpes and Piémont were right to "take issue at the alarming contents of the "Audit report on the major infrastructure and transport projects" drawn up by the General Council of Bridges and Highways and the General Finance Inspectorate", which has just been submitted to the Raffarin government. The chapter on rail projects is particularly damning of the Turin-Lyons tunnel, postponing it until after 2020. At the same time, the report envisages an increase "in heavy-goods traffic at Mont-Blanc and Fréjus," which is incompatible with the Alpine Convention, protests the MEP for Val d'Aoste, adding: "it appears that the French government has distanced itself from the conclusions of the study, which was inevitable as the audit slams the studies, forecasts, the expectations of the last years, and its conclusions hugely contradict the Italy-France bilateral commitments" and the European institutions' choices for the trans-European transport networks, including those of the recent white paper. Mr Caveri, who comments that he has just met the European Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio, hopes that the French Parliament will reject the audit and "relaunch Turin-Lyons". "In the meantime, similar signals are also coming from Brussels", he says.
The French Socialist Gilles Savary had other reasons to be worried about the report, which, he feels, signals a "triple rupture": - with "forty years of voluntary planning and regional re-equilibrium policies", as it will lead to the abandoning of "the patient efforts to reduce the unbalances in the infrastructure between western and eastern France, from Le Havre to Marseilles"; - with the "European Commission's policy of sustainable mobility and fighting traffic congestion". Mr Savary has also condemned the "near-abandoning of the Turin-Lyons road-rail tunnel", and the "total indifference towards the precarious situation of the roads in the Pyrenees, and towards the Basque and trans-Pyrenean rail projects"; - with the doubling rail freight by 2010 objective undertaken by the Jospin government.