Brussels, 08/06/2005 (Agence Europe) - Following the fire on a lorry on 4 June, which led to the deaths of two people, the closure of the Fréjus tunnel linking France and Italy, the Commission highlighted the urgency of providing the EU with the resources for reducing congestion and improving road safety in the Alps, a cross roads region in the Trans-European Network (TEN) and though which almost 80% of goods between Italy and other European countries is transported, two thirds of it by road. Jacques Barrot, Commissioner for Transport stated that, “Heads of States and Governments now have to provide the necessary financial resources to really enable Europe to free up the Alpine route and develop new Alpine railway outlets”.
The Commission is pursuing a global policy of rebalancing rail and road transport with a proposed budget of EUR 20 billion for 2007-13 to help speed up the Mont Cenis railway tunnel on the Lyon-Turin-Budapest line, as well as the Brenner tunnel in Austria, which are part of the 30 TEN-Transport priority projects and which could benefit from an EU co-funding worth 50% for the cross-border parties concerned. Road infrastructure tariffs in the Council's policy agreement on the “Eurovignette” directive allows for a surcharge of 25% in average tolls in cross border mountain regions to fund alternative infrastructure in the same corridor. Commission policy advocating the opening up to competition and modernisation of the railways has already bee efficient in some Member States: the United Kingdom and Germany where the railway freight market opened to competition in 1995 and where the growth in this traffic between 2003-2004 was 13% and 8% respectively. In Poland this figure reached 6.7% because the opening up occurred more recently. The dialogue with Switzerland is soon expected to lead to the setting up of a permanent follow up observatory for road and rail traffic, which will centralise statistics and produce reports on traffic and combined transport in the Alpine region.