The TEN-Ts

Implementation of the Maastricht Treaty on EU in 1993 and adoption by the Council of the European Communities of its Decision 93/628/EEC of 29 October 1993 on ‘the creation of a trans-European com-bined transport network’ gave a new impetus to the evolution of the Common Transport Policy (CTP), particularly the provisions on TEN-Ts which provided a new basis for the EU to contribute to the estab-lishment and development of the transport infrastructure. The EU Commission’s 1992 report The Future Development of the Common Transport Policy identified the fact that while transport demand has grown, investment in inland infrastructure in Europe expressed as a percentage of gross domestic product (GDP) actually declined between 1975 and 1980 from 1.5 per cent to 1.2 per cent but this decline was halted in the early 1980’s and the investment share remained at about one per cent throughout that decade. As the Commission said at the time, growth in transport demand and relative decline in inland transport infra-structure investment have increased pressure on the road and rail network capacity which had reached saturation at many points.

The report identified the development of TEN-Ts for different transport modes and their progressive integration as being one of the important measures needed to improve the quality of intermodal services.

In particular, it pointed out the necessity for identifying those corridors where the maximum potential for transfer (between road and rail) exists and those flows of goods that particularly lend themselves to transfer.

A start had been made, it said, with the Pilot Actions for Combined Transport (PACT) grants scheme described in Chapter 10. Again, in the Commission’s words, terminals are important because they are the vital interfaces between modes, which in large part determine the competitiveness and utility of inter-modal systems. To the extent that they become more effective, the average distance at which combined road–rail transport journeys become competitive with road transport, which at that time (i.e. 1992) was estimated to be in the region of 700 kilometres, was expected to decrease. Given the reality that most freight transport takes place over shorter distances (66 per cent within 50 kilometres and a further 20 per cent within 50–150 kilometres), the future contribution of intermodal transport depends critically on improve-ments in efficiency which would allow it to compete effectively in those shorter distance markets.

The EC saw the problem, insofar as TEN-T development was concerned, as being that until this time (i.e.

1992), transport networks had been designed largely from a national point of view, with emphasis frequently being placed on the development of particular modal networks rather than on the relationships between them, much less their integration as a transport system. This traditional approach had led to problems such as the absence of adequate interconnections between national networks, missing links and bottlenecks as well as obstacles to inter-operability entailing huge inefficiencies. Examples of this exist in rail operations, such as differing loading gauges and electric power supply, and in combined transport with incompat-ible approaches to the technical specifications for equipment. Additionally, there were differences in the geographical situation and economic histories of EU Member States that resulted in considerable diver-gence in the availability and quality of transport infrastructures. For example, the centre and north of the EU was much better equipped in this respect than the periphery and the south. The Commission said that gen-eral stagnation in investment in transport infrastructure over the 1980s had not provided an environment favouring the early elimination of these problems and imbalances. Overcoming them was a major aspect of the work, not just through investment but also in planning, to ensure the integration of the EU’s transport 134 Intermodal networks and freight interchanges

system through the completion and combination of networks, taking particular account of the needs of the more geographically isolated regions. The objective was, and remains today, to link islands, landlocked and peripheral regions with the central regions of the EU.

Prior to publication of the 1992 report, the EU was already committed to giving financial support to a number of priority road-links, including two motorways and tunnels through the Pyrenees between France and Spain, a motorway connection between Lisbon and Madrid and better links between England and Ireland. Rail projects concerned, essentially, two high-speed networks, one serving the north of the Community and the other the south. The northern network is designed to connect London, Paris, Brussels, Amsterdam, and Cologne, with onward links to other destinations, while the second provides a Mediter-ranean backbone running from Seville via Madrid, Barcelona, Lyons, Turin, and Milan to Venice. Among the original 14 priority Trans-European Network (TEN) projects (see list below) five were directly aimed at furthering combined transport solutions, these being: the so-called Brenner axis which links Berlin with the Italian city of Napoli (the final sections of this key route are due to be opened in 2005); the 160-kilometre Betuwelijn maritime (i.e. container) freight railway across the Netherlands linking the port of Rotterdam to the German rail network at the Dutch/German border; the combined transport line across Ireland from Cork in the south to Belfast; upgrading and renewal of the 850-kilometre UK West Coast rail Main Line (WCML) from London to Glasgow due for completion in 2007; and the Lyon to Turin link between the high-speed rail networks of France and Italy involving 750 kilometres of new lines and a 57-kilometre long Gotthard tunnel through the Alps, one of the longest rail tunnels in the world. The remainder included such projects as high-speed passenger train links between major European cities (e.g. Paris, Brussels, Cologne (Köln), Amsterdam, London, the so-called ‘PBKAL’ network); various cross-border motorway links and road corri-dors; a new International airport for Athens at Sparta (now in service); the Øresund link between Copen-hagen in Denmark with Malmö in Sweden comprising tunnel, road and rail links and including the world’s longest cable-stayed bridge for road and heavy rail traffic (completed in 2002); and yet another long sea crossing by way of a 19-kilometre long-fixed bridge/tunnel link across the Baltic between Denmark and Germany across the Fehmarn Strait, brought forward in the TEN-T programme and now scheduled for com-pletion by 2013; various inland waterway upgradings, an air traffic management system for Europe and the multimodal global navigation and positioning satellite system known as Galileo (see below).

The 14 priority TEN-T projects adopted in 1996 were as follows:

1. High-speed train/combined transport north–south 7. Greek motorways, Pathe and Via Egnatia

8. Multimodal link Portugal–Spain–Central Europe

9. Conventional rail link Cork–Dublin–Belfast–Larne–Stranraer 10. Malpensa airport Milan

11. Øresund fixed rail/road link between Denmark and Sweden 12. Nordic triangle rail/road

13. Ireland/United Kingdom/Benelux road link 14. West Coast Main Line (UK rail project).

All the proposed rail, motorway or waterway links were chosen according to a range of selection cri-teria: economic importance for the region, employment creation, benefit for industry and viability, poten-tial for private investment and financing, community interest like trans-frontier links, or interconnection of networks. All had to pass the environmental impact scrutiny. It was up to the public authorities of the

Member States, the regions or municipalities, and the private partners to decide on the implementation of these projects. The prime aim being to connect national networks and build the necessary motorway links, many of which were in the outlying regions of the Community (i.e. in Ireland, Greece, Portugal, and Spain). The networks in these countries then only accounted for only 20 per cent of the Community total.

Another important objective was to relieve congestion on the roads with users being made to meet the real traffic costs, for example, by wider application of road tolls as we are seeing now in the early 2000s.

11.1.1 TEN-T 2002 progress report

By 2002, 6 years on from when the majority of these initial projects were proposed or commenced, the EC reported that only 20 per cent of the work had been completed. Public investment in transport infrastructure had fallen from 1.5 per cent of GDP in the 1980s to less than 1 per cent in the 1990s and the resulting delays affected cross-border projects in particular. The EU’s transport commissioner Loyola de Palacio said, in launching an update report on progress with the TEN-Ts in 2002:

At the present rate, and without additional financing, a further 20 years will be needed just to complete the work planned for 2010. At the same time, by 2010 the economic growth rate envisaged by the European Council is likely to generate increases of 38 per cent in freight traffic compared with 1998. As the Commission’s September 2001 White Paper on European transport policy for 2010 demonstrates, without a major effort to rebalance traffic growth this means a rise of 50 per cent in road freight. This growth and the delays in building the TEN-T, demand a new transport policy covering improved regulation of competition, the promotion of intermodal transport and the shift of traffic from the roads, and better targeting of investment. Community action should supplement national plans, and must be guided by research to identify priorities with a real value to Europe as a whole.

The 1994 European Council (meeting) in Essen initiated this concentration of effort by selecting a first series of priority projects. With the same objective, in October 2001 the Commission proposed a revision of the guidelines for the TEN. This proposal, called for by the (European) Council, strengthens the priority given to the first series of projects, takes stock of progress, and responds to new challenges with plans for six new priority projects including deployment of the Galileo satellite system and the crossing of the Pyrenees by rail.

The six new priority projects (and two extension projects) proposed by the EC in 2001 were as follows:

New projects (numbered by the EC to follow on from the first 14 projects listed above) 15. Global navigation and positioning satellite system Galileo

16. High-capacity rail link across the Pyrenees

17. Eastern European combined transport/high-speed train 18. Danube river improvement between Vilshofen and Straubing 19. High-speed rail interoperability on the Iberian Peninsula 20. Fehmarn Belt: fixed link between Germany and Denmark.

Two further extensions to existing TEN-T projects were also proposed, namely:

Project 1. High-speed train/combined transport north–south (Verona–Naples and Bologna–Milan) Project 3. High-speed train South (Montpellier–Nîmes).

11.1.2 New 2004 TEN-T guidelines

In April 2004, yet another step forward was taken to revitalize the TEN-Ts when the European Parliament adopted new Guidelines for the 30 priority projects (which include the 20 projects listed above) declared 136 Intermodal networks and freight interchanges

to be of European interest, these projects are listed in detail at the end of the chapter. According to the EC’s Press statement, the extension of major European axes to the future Member States should help to make enlargement a success and provide the Union with a new opportunity to reduce congestion, improve accessibility, and encourage intermodality. The new Guidelines, which follow on from a report made in 2003 by the High-Level Group on the TEN-T chaired by Mr Karel Van Miert (i.e. the so-called

‘Group Van Miert Report’) have a strong focus on the enlargement of the Union and the need to integrate the networks of the 10 new Member States that joined the EU in May 2004, namely Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Slovakia, and Slovenia. The Press state-ment announcing the Guidelines is reproduced here in full (with acknowledgestate-ment to the EC) because of its significance in identifying both the objectives and the projects contained therein:

The list of projects also aims at ensuring modal shift and more sustainable mobility patterns by focusing investments in rail and waterborne transport. Strong focus is directed towards cross-border projects as these are said to be ‘typically the most difficult ones to implement’.

The estimated cost of carrying out these 30 projects will be around €225 billion by 2020.

Some 20 per cent of the total amount could be raised from the private sector and the rest will have to come from the national and Community budgets, notably within the framework of the financial perspectives after 2006. The total cost of completion of the TEN-T, includ-ing the projects of common interest not identified as priority projects, will be €600 billion.

Implementation of the priority projects should produce time savings for international trans-port, help to reduce the growing pollution due to transport and contribute to more balanced spatial development. These benefits would boost the growth potential of the Union up to 0.3% of GDP and create up to 1 million new jobs according to recent research.

A new mechanism for supporting Motorways of the Sea is one of the new priority projects aiming at concentrating freight flows on a limited number of sea connections to ensure their financial viability while reducing road traffic. The importance of the development of Motor-ways of the Sea is to ensure that transnational maritime links between countries isolated for geographical reasons, or affected by road congestion, will be treated with the same import-ance as land links. The objective is to concentrate freight transport for some key links on a limited number of ports to increase the viability of these links. Member States will be encouraged to jointly establish transnational maritime links through tendering procedures to avoid distortion of competition. The new decision will also allow Community financial support through startup aid. The Motorways of the Sea provide an alternative route to exist-ing bottlenecks (e.g. the congested Pyrenean crossexist-ing), and connect Europe with periph-eral countries and island regions and states (e.g. in the Baltic Sea region).

Declaration of European interest

The Guidelines declare the 30 priority projects to be of European interest. This declaration aims at ensuring the timely completion of the projects by focusing on them the resources available from the various community financial instruments for the networks. These dec-larations of European interest would open the way to co-ordinated evaluation and public consultation procedures and allow the carrying out of a single transnational enquiry in the case of certain cross-border sections. To solve the difficulties caused by Member States’

separate national evaluation procedures, the Guidelines will make it possible for the Member States to co-ordinate their evaluation and public consultation procedures prior to the authorization of projects. For certain cross-border sections, such as bridges or tunnels, the Member States should aim at conducting a transnational enquiry. To enable this

process, the Commission will work on methodologies and tools for socio-economic and environmental evaluation of projects.

Concentration of aid from the Community

The fact that the priority projects will be declared to be of European interest will make it eas-ier to focus on them the aid for the TENs, from the Cohesion Fund and the Structural Funds.

The guidelines are complemented by the new rules for granting of aid in the field of TENs, which are due to enter into force in the coming months. In particular, these new rules increase the co-funding rate from 10 per cent to 20 per cent (compared with 30 per cent in the Commission proposal) for the sections of the priority projects, which crosses borders and natural barriers. This rate should provide a greater incentive for implementation of projects including the setting up of public–private partnerships. These new rules should also allow multi-annual commitments, which would provide greater flexibility in the financial com-mitments to promoters of TEN-T projects.

Closer international co-operation

Delays in completion of links reduce the return on the investments made by neighbouring Member States on the same axis. To encourage better synchronization of investment, the Commission will designate, case-by-case, a European co-ordinator for projects or groups of projects located on the same European axis. The co-ordinator will also give advice on the financial package for the projects.

The package will stimulate the European economy

The investments in the TEN priority projects would reduce congestion on roads by 14 per cent and the monetary value of time savings to international traffic is approximately

€8 billion per year. These benefits would stimulate the economy of the enlarged Europe and increase the GDP between 0.14 per cent and 0.3 per cent according to recent research (i.e. TIPMAC and IASON projects funded under the 5th Framework Transport Research Programme). This would translate into half a million to 1 million new jobs.