Brussels, 06/04/2009 (Agence Europe) - On Thursday 2 April, the European Parliament rapporteur on the amended draft Eurovignette directive, Saïd El Khadraoui (PES, Belgium), said that he was “truly disappointed” by the orientation debate at the most recent Transport Council during which many delegations, including Germany, highlighted the financial crisis as reason for their proposals to postpone discussion of the text (EUROPE 9872). Mr El Khadraoui stated that in the context of environmental taxes, “if we postpone the approval of this directive, we will end up without a legal framework for environmental tolls on our roads”, which would lead to it being impossible to charge lorries for the environmental damage they cause for a long time, “even long after the crisis”. The rapporteur stated that “the road industry acts as if the Eurovignette directive should put all their companies into bankruptcy…but let's put this crisis and the Eurovignette into the right perspective” and affirmed that: a scheme to impose additional charges under “externalities” (noise, air pollution and congestion, according to the initial proposal) will be limited to a minimum percentage of operational costs for lorries and will not lead to “runaway inflation or massive price increases in our supermarkets”; the tax scheme is not mandatory and as we are at the very beginning of the legislative procedure it is possible that when the directive enters into force, the crisis will have finished long before; the principle of earmarking the revenues of the environmental charge to investments in measures to lower or abolish external costs, if it accepted by member states, could prove advantageous to industry and society. The rapporteur explained that “lower external costs mean lower changes and less pollution that harms the population”. A recent report from the European Environment Agency (submitted to the EP transport committee on Monday 30 March) indicated that the recent and continued increase in transport had led to a rise in greenhouse gas emissions of 27% between1996-2006 (on roads alone). Despite technological improvements by industry, fine particle pollutants and nitrogen oxide did not appear to have slackened off and the increase in traffic, which is expected to double by 2020, is making environmental problems related to transport, worse. Mr El Khadraoui said that they had to take action now if they were to mitigate the negative effects linked to transport and reach the targets in the climate and energy strategy (3x20) and those discussed during the climate change conference in Copenhagen last October. He also said: “I sincerely hope member states will now follow the assembly's lead and reach an agreement soon on this directive” (Ed: stated on the draft directive during the first reading on 11 March). He added that if the two institutions managed to cooperate, it would be possible to “construct a directive that can serve as a model to internalise external costs in an intelligent and pragmatic way in the entire transport system”. (A.By/transl.rh)