TENT-T Priority Projects: Where do we Stand?

Abstract

1. Introduction It is also in the quality and extension of networked transport infrastructures, although not only in this, that the character of a State can be assessed. With the single market in existence and the single currency in circulation, the progress made by the EU and its Member States in transport networks appears limited if the results are compared with the original ambitions and programs. It is, therefore, worth asking what the problems and the perspectives are of TEN-T, i.e. the core Trans European Transport Network. Section 2 provides a short overview of its main steps and achievements. The paper then focuses the funding gap, i.e. the most evident TEN-T problem (Section 3), the differences between infrastructure capital and public investment and their relations with economic growth (Section 4) and the funding implications of long-term real interest rates (Section 5). The profitability issue (Section 6) and the budgeting issue of infrastructure investment (Section 7) are also considered. Section 8 is dedicated to the governance aspects with special reference to the Italian case. Section 9 briefly concludes. 2. Pan-European Corridors, TENs, TEN-T Pan-European transport corridors are new modern routes in Central and Eastern Europe envisaged to speed up integration in the European Community, which in the early 1990s was already set to enlarge. The European Transport Network (TENT-T) was planned as part of the Trans European Networks (TENs), i.e. the infrastructure policy embedded in the Maastricht Treaty (1992). In both cases the aim basically was to allow goods and people to circulate quickly and easily across borders, and the realization of a single, multimodal network, in particular, was intended to parallel the completion of the single market and the start of the process expected to lead to the launch of the single currency. The TEN-T network was planned to comprise traditional infrastructure and equipment as well as innovative management transport systems. In December 1993 the European Council established a group of representatives chaired by the Commission Vice-President H. Cristophersen to identify a limited number of concrete projects of major importance for the EU-12. The selected 14 projects were chosen on the basis of relevance and a number of other criteria, but even then the available financial resources appeared limited. In 1994, after the completion of the internal market, at the start of Stage 2 of the convergence process to the euro and the then foreseen acceleration in the enlargement process in the east, the ten Pan-European Corridors and the TEN-T network coalesced into a single large program of infrastructure building. In 2004, i.e. just after the accession of ten new member countries, the list of priority projects was extended to 30 in order to take into account two further new entrants to what is now known as the EU-27. The series of 30 axes had already been identified in late 2004 on the basis of proposals from the Member States and was devised by concentrating on major projects capable of completing those implemented at national level. Indeed, the network was intended to deepen European integration and completion was planned for 2020. Ten years later, L. Barrot, Vice-President of the EC with responsibility for transport in the EU-25 (Barrot, 2005) unambiguously remarked that the results had fallen short of the original ambitions largely because the amount of resources required was huge. Indeed, a true trans-European network for the then still enlarging EU-25 had been estimated to amount to 900bn [euro] over the period 1996-2020 (EC-DG TREN, 2010). The 30 TEN-T priority projects form the first layer of the European network of rail, road, internal waterways and sea waterway axes. The estimated cost was 415bn [euro]. The priority projects basically pursue interconnection between national networks since road, rail and air traffic management systems or horizontal projects were added. …