Applicants face huge bill to bring networks up to scratch

Date: 21/09/00

By Chris Johnstone

CENTRAL and eastern Europe's biggest transport challenge is the same as that faced by the developed West - keeping passengers and cargo on the rails rather than the road.

The institutional bridge to enlargement will not be blocked by this question, or by any other transport issues. However, the spectacular development of East-West trade which has underpinned economic growth in the candidate countries over the past decade could founder if the right infrastructure is not in place.

Unlike in existing member states, where the task is to turn the tide in what has been a losing battle for the railways, the time-warp realities of the candidate countries means a more balanced transport mix can be salvaged.

One of the bonuses of the command economies which were still in place just over a decade ago was that most freight and a considerable number of passengers were still carried by rail. But rail was slow to react to the redirection of trade from the East to the West which accompanied the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Throughout the latter half of the 1990s, the railways of central and eastern Europe saw an almost uninterrupted decline in the quantity of cargo carried. Figures from the Paris-based International Union of Railways (UIC) show an 8.6% year-on-year fall in freight tonnage transported in 1998, following on from a 0.8% decline in 1997 and a 1.7% drop in 1996.

The figures for passengers are on the same downward track. Freight figures for the start of 2000 show a small revival, but any talk of a recovery would be premature.

National railways, still state-owned but now in the process of being split into track and transport divisions in line with the model encouraged by the European Commission, are not immune to the problem. They have been investing considerable sums in modernisation only to see the sector continue to lose ground. "It is a paradoxical situation," says Jozef Fazik of the UIC. "But for the heavy investment, the fall in traffic would have been a lot worse."

In most countries, the national railways are still among the biggest employers. The serious reductions in the workforce needed to help these companies compete have often been delayed for social and political reasons.

Ironically, the switch to road transport has occurred, except in former East Germany, without the matching investment in new motorways or ring roads to take the strain. Key pieces of infrastructure, such as a motorway linking Nuremburg to Pilsen and Prague in the Czech Republic and one linking Dresden to Prague and finally Vienna are being built, albeit with delays. But many others are not. Slovakia, for better or worse, has hardly any motorways. The Polish government is seriously looking at toll systems to pay for road links which cannot be funded out-of-state coffers.

The EU-sponsored Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) of 26

would-be accession countries points to an urgent need for spending on 18,000 kilometres of roads, 20,000 kilometres of railways, 38 airports, 13 sea ports and 49 river ports as the minimum requirement for these countries to be connected with the West and with each other.

Although EU cash is on offer, most of the 90-billion euro bill for TINA projects and other programmes will have to be met by the countries concerned themselves. Obtaining some of the Union funds on offer has also proved problematic as, for much of it, the EU demands environmental impact assessment studies and some countries' planning procedures do not yet make provision for these to be carried out.

Central and eastern Europe's biggest transport challenge is the same as that faced by the developed West - keeping passangers and cargo on the raills rather than the road.