PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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The 1998 Decision is particularly relevant in that transport, together with
agriculture, energy, industry, and tourism, was one of five chosen “target sectors” whose
selection was to give “additional impetus” to the implementation in the two remaining
years of the program. While this is certainly commendable, actual listed priority
objectives within the transport sector were rather pedestrian and largely repeated previous
eco-modernist commitments and sound bites, e.g. “tighten provisions on emissions and
noise,” “achieve better internalisation of external costs in transport prices,” “promoting a
more integrated transport policy,” “better integration of land-use and transportation,”
“promoting demand-management measures,” “facilitating intermodality,” or
“encouraging public and/or collective transport and low-emission vehicles.” However,
the decision also mentioned the concrete aim to reduce the imbalances between different
transport modes by developing methodologies for Strategic Environmental Assessment
(SEA) 6 for the TENs and for corridor analysis. This concrete aim eventually translated
into several pilot studies in that area, as well as an entire handbook on SEA. However, to
date, there has been no SEA performed on either the TENs or TINA (also see Chapter 7).
Remarkably, the Decision does not contain a single mention of (the need to
promote) non-motorized transport, and apart from cursory mentions of the need to favor
public transport, the transport priority section is entirely silent on the topic of urban
transport. This is especially surprising given the fact that in a later section on priority
issue areas, Article 10 on the “promotion of local and regional initiatives” specifically
mentions that “particular attention will be given to [...] (b) developing a comprehensive
6 SEAs are sometimes also called Strategic Environmental Impact Assessments (SEIAs). SEA is the more
commonly used acronym that is used throughout this study. The actual phrase used in the decision is more
already cautious not to demand outright that an SEA on the TENs be performed - a long-term demand of
environmental NGOs - but rather aims at “developing potential methods of analysis with a view to strategic
evaluation of the environmental impact of the trans-European transport network.” Also see Chapter 7.