EIB urged to ‘invest in rail, not roads’

Date: 14/11/02

By David Cronin

GREEN campaigners are calling on the European Investment Bank (EIB) to provide more money for rail and put less into road projects in the countries bidding for EU membership.

The call follows a 'countdown to enlargement' forum in Vienna (7-8 November) held by the EIB, which is the Union's main lending arm.

An Austrian activist with Friends of the Earth protested at the meeting about the EIB's large-scale support for car-clogged roads, at the apparent expense of more ecologically sound forms of transport.

'Because EU enlargement will increase traffic and transport, we are calling for more investment in railway infrastructure,' said Heinz Hoegelsberger. 'The construction of motorways that the EIB plans to finance will damage the environment as well as people's quality of life - both in the candidate countries and in adjacent Austria.'

Since 1990, the EIB has given more than €1 billion to major transport projects in Poland, the biggest of the ten countries hoping to join the Union in 2004.

One of the most contentious development plans has been a stretch of the A4 motorway, due to link western Europe with Ukraine.

Robert Cyglicki, from the Polish Green Net organisation, said a 9.4 kilometre stretch of the motorway would run through the Polish landscape park Mount Saint Anna, endangering an area rich in flora and fauna.

But an EIB spokeswoman disputed his assertion. She said that the motorway had been designed in such a way as to avoid damaging the park.

The EIB has also come in for criticism over a new bridge across the Danube which it is financing in Bratislava, Slovakia.

Campaigners opposing the loan claim the vehicles on the bridge will substantially increase the noise and air pollution levels for communities living nearby.

Peter Mihok, from the Centre for European Public Advocacy in Slovakia, argued that the process of consulting locals about the bridge 'seems like little more than a 'tick-the-box' exercise to appease the public'.

Although the EIB had said there should be public consultation before the loans are granted, this 'only happened after almost a year of prodding and huge protests by the local communities', Mihok added.

The bank's spokeswoman contested this view, adding that the EIB had agreed to provide money for the project only after it was subject to an environmental impact assessment.

She added that the bank had raised similar concerns over traffic and noise as those held by campaign groups with the entrepreneurs behind the bridge.

The bank also took on board the campaigners' concerns, she said - some had feared the project would involve the felling of 600 trees, but that number was reduced by one-third.

Green campaigners are calling on the European Investment Bank (EIB) to provide more money for rail and put less into road projects in the countries bidding for EU membership.