PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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to react to a situation of rising levels of traffic congestion, noise, accidents, and pollution
in urbanized areas, as well as ill-maintained and inappropriate regional and long-distance
infrastructures. 3
In such contexts, the pursuit of sustainable transport infrastructure
investments appears as a particularly daunting task.
This chapter looks at two major EU transport sector initiatives that were launched
at the Pan-European level in the mid- to late 1990s just as accession negotiations with the
candidate countries began to pick up steam. First, I take a look at the gestation process
of the ten Pan-European Corridors, the so-called Helsinki Corridors. After that, I will
analyze the Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) process for CEE
countries supported by the European Commission. I also include a section on a strategic
assessment effort carried out for the TINA corridor between Warsaw and Budapest. The
presented material on these processes will then provide the setting for the subsequent
case study on EU pre-accession transport infrastructure investments support for Poland
and Hungary in Chapter 8. Note that the European transport ministers’ agreement on the
ten Helsinki Corridors can be considered a “history-making” (Peterson and Bomberg
1999) and therefore internationally binding decision, while the TINA process, despite
3 In fact, pollution from stationary sources, particularly sulphur/SO2 emissions fell drastically after the
transition. Also, due to the economic downturn and the switch from coal to gas in the region, overall
emissions of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas, fell between 1990 and 1995. Since then, this
development has been increasingly offset by transport-related CO2 emissions from road vehicles (European
Environment Agency 2002). In Poland, CO2 emissions from transport rose by 23%, those from road
transport even by 40% between 1988 and 1999. Road transport now accounts for 96% of all CO2
emissions in Poland. Figures are similar for Hungary, although the most rapid increases in motorization
already occurred during the 1980s (Hook 1999:207). Nevertheless, transport-related CO2 emissions still
rose by 10%, and those from road transport by 23% between 1987 and 1999, with road transport now
accounting for 97% of all CO2 emissions in Hungary. See OECD (2002:27). Last but not least, after a
decade of rising death tolls, road safety is now improving again in most CEE countries, including Hungary
and Poland (European Conference of Ministers of Transport (ECMT) 2001).