Peripheral achievements. The success of the trans-European transport network (see this column yesterday) is tied into a certain number of conditions. The first, obviously, concerns its financial allocation. The vice-president of the Commission, Jacques Barrot, has reaffirmed that it will be impossible to achieve the priority projects, decided on by common agreement by all the institutions of the Union, if the overall funding for the years 2070 to 2013 is not very close to the 20 billion EUR proposed by the Commission with the support of the European Parliament. For next year, the services of the Commission have proved that there are already sufficient projects close to fruition to be able to absorb a similar sum to that which the Union should have available to it annually as of 2007 (or nearly 3 billion EUR). In fact, the 2006 budget, which is currently being discussed between the Council and Parliament, is not likely to have very much more than around 60 million EUR.
The legal and regulatory framework is equally fundamental. In particular:
The "Eurovignette" regulation (taxation on heavy-goods vehicles for using road infrastructure) is on the table of the European Parliament for second reading. The Commission feels that the text agreed upon by the Council needs to be seriously amended on a few important points, concerning in particular the application of the system to the motorway network as a whole and what the revenue will be used for;
The guarantee mechanism put forward by the Commission (in order to overcome certain hesitations or mistrust on the part of private investors who had their fingers burned over the Channel Tunnel) must be adopted as part of the financial perspectives 2007-2013;
The executive agency the Commission has decided to set up to manage the co-funding of the EU for the various projects, in collaboration with the EIB, must become operational quickly.
Contested objectives? A new element, general in nature and almost a doctrine, has recently come on top of the aforementioned aspects. Yesterday, I spoke of the general significance of the programme. In order to achieve its economic, social, environmental and other ambitions, the priority objectives lie in relaunching and modernising the railway network in order to get a proportion of goods transport transferred from the road to the railway and to combined transport (and to the "sea motorways"). This objective was supported by all of the European institutions, for ecological and safety reasons in particular. The road hauliers, unsurprisingly, defend their positions, speak out against the possible increase in taxation upon them and underline their contribution to employment and trade efficiency; but nobody is trying to say that an effort should not be made to breathe new life into railway transport. However, for the first time to my knowledge, the very principle of transferring a proportion of road traffic to rail has been challenged in a conference held on 12 July by two members of the European Parliament, Ari Vatanen and Malcolm Harbour, of the EPP-ED group (see our bulletin 8991).
According to Mr Ari Vatanen and Professor Rémy Prud'homme of the University of Paris, transferring traffic from road to rail is physically impossible and would run counter to the prosperity of Europe, because the excessive cost of various investments would, in their opinion, divert resources away from other priorities such as education, health and research. For his part, high-ranking Dutch official Henne J.J. Schuver explained that his country had abandoned the policy of modal transport, due to its cost and the fact that these days, trucks pollute less than formerly. Are these hypotheses valid? I put this question to Jacques Barrot: he replied that he did not agree at all, that in this demonstration there were "many mistakes and false arguments", and that it had been "excruciating" for him to hear them. According to Director General François Lamoureux, Professor Prud'homme "was talking nonsense"; in France and the Netherlands alike, there are many lobbies defending their interests.
By the end of this year, the Commission is to present an update to its White Paper of 2001 on transport policy, and Mr Barrot has anticipated the principles from which inspiration will be drawn: a) complementarity rather than opposition between modes of transport, each one with its own role to play; b) harmonisation of competition conditions, so that users can choose objectively which mode of transport is best for them; c) promotion of intermodality when conditions are favourable to this; d) very strict criteria of economic relevance for all new investments. If these principles are abided by, this should guarantee the rigour and relevance of choices which have already been made, or which are to be made in the future, in terms of transport infrastructure.
(F.R.)