Delays hit TENs priority projects

Date: 01/06/2000

By Renée Cordes

LESS than one quarter of the EU's prestigious list of showcase transport projects have been completed and under half of the required funding has been secured, according to a report due out next week.

The annual progress report by European construction industry federation FIEC on the 14 priority projects will show that just 22% of the work was finished by the end of last year, with 47% of the financing in place. This includes funds from all possible sources, including the Union's Trans-European Networks (TENs) budget, member states' coffers and public-private partnerships between government and industry.

The findings will be scrutinised closely by the European Commission as it prepares to revise the guidelines for the TENs initiative, which aims to create a network of rail, road, air and shipping links across the EU by 2010, in the autumn.

Although a final decision on whether to revise or even abandon the priority list will lie with member states, Commission officials say they are drawing up plans to shift the focus of the TENs towards eliminating bottlenecks on existing networks and giving environmental concerns greater importance.

"One of the major problems has been that these projects have generally not been viewed as trans-European projects but as sections of national projects," said Domenico Campogrande, head of economic and legal affairs at FIEC. "This is somehow starting to change."

However, he said that the rate of progress in completing the priority projects was likely to slow in the next few years as the most-straight-forward schemes, such as the Oresund road-rail link between Denmark and Sweden and the Irish rail link, are about to be finished while those dogged by problems from the start are still limping along.

Work has, for example, barely begun on the Brenner tunnel, a key stretch of the high-speed train and combined transport route stretching from Berlin through Austria and to Verona in Italy. Another high-profile project - the high-speed train network intended to link London, Paris, Brussels, Cologne and Amsterdam - is not due to be completed until 2007 because of a long-running dispute between the Belgian and Dutch railways and governments over where their link routes should be laid and who should foot the bill.

Many critics of the TENs initiative argue the process used to draw up the list of priority projects was flawed from the start. Each member state was asked by the Commission to submit its own wish-list for schemes and EU leaders then decided in 1994 which 14 projects were essential to the creation of a pan-European 'intermodal' network linking peripheral Union regions to the centre.

They say that in many cases, decisions were dictated more by individual governments' desire to secure EU funding for a high-profile scheme for political reasons than by economic sense, and attention therefore focused on the big projects rather than looking at the network as a whole. "There is growing evidence that these projects are not sustainable from an economic point of view," said Maarten Labberton, head of the International Road Transport Union's (IRU) Union delegation. "The overall problem with the TENs is that it has a limited impact. There is still a political preference for railways, with not enough emphasis on road networks."

However, the Commission insisted this week that the target date for completing the programme could still be met. "At this stage we are still intending to keep to the 2010 deadline," said one, adding that "progress comes in fits and starts".

Less than one quarter of the EU's prestigious list of showcase transport projects have been completed and under half of the required funding has been secured, according to a forthcoming report.

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