PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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between member states, and prospects for environmentally-friendly, transparent
infrastructure decision-making are bleaker in the case of the candidate countries given the
dire state of CEE transport infrastructures.
The transport infrastructure investment decision-making process in the CEE
candidate countries must of course be seen in context with the collapse of Communism in
that region, and the transformation from a centrally planned to a market economy. CEE
countries are in various stages of transition, displaying variable degrees of privatization
and decentralization. Economic recession in the 1990s led to a severe reduction in
spending capacities of governments, particularly at the local level. In the area of
transport and land use, socialism left a legacy of non-market based infrastructures, landuses
and (intra-urban) population densities. Before the transition, low price, primarily
rail-based transport was provided by large, publicly-owned and –subsidized companies,
meaning that road networks were comparatively modest in size and relatively
undifferentiated. Also, significant backlogs in infrastructure and equipment maintenance
were already built up during the 1980s. Then, during the 1990s, the rapid rise in
individual motorization, the falling demand for public transport, the emergence of weakly
regulated private vehicle operators and dramatic shifts in urban land uses began to erode
the monopoly position of public transport companies and put them into existential
operational and financial difficulties. Between 1988 and 1996, public transport’s share of
motorized trips fell from 79 to 50% in Poland and from 80 to 52% in Hungary (Pucher
1999:227). By contrast, between 1990 and 1998, motorization levels rose from 276 to
511 cars per 1000 inhabitants in Prague, from 190 to 392 in Warsaw, and from 235 to
313 in Budapest (Mitric 2002). National and local governments are presently struggling