No smooth ride for transport sector

Date: 21/01/1999

By Chris Johnstone

EUROPEAN transport has shaken off its carefree youth and is being confronted with a painful middle age in which it has to shoulder responsibility and pay its way.

The Sixties and Seventies credo which linked the rise of motor and air transport with progress and freedom has been deflated for good and replaced by a political correctness in which transport conjures up images of congestion, noise and pollution.

EU policy-making has taken a new turn aimed at managing unsustainable growth and making the sector pay for the pollution it causes and the infrastructure it uses.

That is the theory. Transforming the concept of sustainable transport into reality is proving a lot less easy.

Last year, Union governments and the European Commission agreed the biggest package of measures to cut pollution from cars and vans in the Union's history. Known as the 'Auto-Oil' programme, the new standards are expected to halve emissions from diesel-powered vehicles by 2000 and lead to a 30-40&percent; cut in emissions from petrol engines by the same date.

Car manufacturers have, after a lot of kicking and screaming, also made a voluntary commitment to cut carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles by 25&percent; over the next decade.

However, this will not be enough on its own to ensure that the EU meets the commitments it made at the Kyoto climate change conference in late 1997 to reduce pollution from greenhouse gases. Emissions from the transport sector, which currently account for one quarter of the Union's production of CO2 would, if unchecked, contribute around half of such pollution by 2010.

One way in which the Commission hopes to combat an increase in noxious gases from transport is by forcing polluters to pay for the damage they inflict on the environment and shoulder the full costs of using infrastructure. That policy is, however, still a long way from bearing fruit in the road transport sector and has yet to be formulated for aviation.

But air transport is clearly in the Commission's sights. Airlines have so far had a fairly free ride when it comes to footing the bill for pollution and other costs. Aviation fuel, kerosene, is not even subject to excise duty under an international gentlemen's agreement.

With such transport registering double-digit growth throughout most of the 1990s, and this trend set to continue for the foreseeable future, tackling pollution from aircraft is now one of the top priorities on the Commission's environmental agenda.

Germany, which took over the EU presidency at the start of January, has promised to push the issue of a Union-wide kerosene tax. But many airlines are warning that this would amount to a competitive handicap if their world-wide competitors did not have to bear the same burden.

A Commission policy paper on aviation and the environment due out next month will spell out the institution's ideas on a fuel tax and possible measures to tackle noise disturbance.

Officials are also struggling to find a solution to the problems faced by newcomers trying to take on the airline industry's giants as they battle for take-off and landing slots at overcrowded airports. The existing slot-allocation rules are clearly not working, but no easy answer appears to be on the horizon.

If road and aviation are part of the problem, the Commission has earmarked railways as part of the solution.

However, its crusade to shift more traffic (especially cargo) from road to rail has, as Transport Commissioner Neil Kinnock would himself admit, fallen far short of expectations. Rail's share of the freight market has fallen to a painfully low 14&percent; from around 30&percent; in 1970.

The EU is struggling to reverse this trend by promoting 'freight freeways': tailor-made cross-border routes on which trains carrying goods will not be forced to travel at an average of only 30 kilometres an hour on busy tracks or be pushed into sidings. But it has had only limited success. Just one is up and running, between Antwerp and Milan, although another three are waiting to get on line.

Perhaps more in desperation than hope, Kinnock and his staff are now focusing their efforts on a more ambitious approach to the problem, calling for EU governments to open up one quarter of their freight markets to competition over ten years.

While most member states appear willing to consider the idea, France - a key transit country for rail - has dismissed it.

Rather than worrying about a possible threat from rail in the future, road haulage companies are far more concerned at the moment about Social Affairs Commissioner Pádraig Flynn's proposal to cut the hours worked by lorry drivers to an average maximum of 48 hours a week. They claim that the move to widen existing EU rules on working hours to lorry drivers will erode already slender profit margins.

However, the move towards harmonised Union rules might bring some peace to a strike-hit sector split in the past by accusations that companies in some countries are winning an unfair competitive advantage by forcing their drivers to work longer hours.

Meanwhile, Commission funding for the transport sector has gone a long way to achieving its main aim of creating a basic high-speed European rail and road network by filling in the gaps created by the uncoordinated development of separate national systems.

Most of the 14 Trans-European Network (TENs) transport schemes identified by the Union's leaders five years ago will be completed by 2000.

Attention is now turning to the possibility of finding funds for the latest light in Kinnock's eye: telematics and satellite systems. A combination of these navigation systems and on-board equipment in ships, aircraft and vehicles promises to cut congestion and make more efficient use of existing infrastructure.

The European Investment Bank (EIB) has been identified as a possible source of loans for some projects. However, the costs involved in creating an accurate global navigation system have forced the Commission to investigate a partnership with the US, Japan and Russia.

In central and eastern Europe, the Commission accepts that car ownership will rise dramatically as wealth increases. The signs are there already in some relatively affluent cities such as Prague, where new Skodas abound on suburban housing estates.

Developing both road and rail infrastructure is therefore seen by the Commission as the dual-sided priority in the €90-billion process of bringing the region's infrastructure up to EU standards.

At the same time, however, Kinnock has warned the applicant countries not to make the same mistake as the Union by running down their railway industries, especially freight.

Local transport experts in central and eastern Europe point out that 75&percent; of EU regional aid to its four poorest countries (Spain, Portugal, Greece and Ireland) has been targeted on road spending. They cannot see any reason why the same principle should not apply to them.

However, there are clear problems in the way the small stretches of motorway in the region are managed at the moment.

Many of them have been built with private capital and charge high tolls to recoup that investment. The result is empty motorways with parallel trunk roads and villages choked with traffic.

Whatever solutions are eventually chosen by governments, most of the costs will have to come from their own coffers. The Commission is only promising 'seed-corn' cash.

Commission economists claim, however, that countries will only have to maintain existing levels of transport infrastructure spending to implement their blueprint of necessary work.