PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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given equal weight on the resulting map, in reality the section of corridor II linking Berlin
and Warsaw was obviously of much greater importance for Pan-European trade and
traffic flows than the stretch of corridor VII linking Durres to Tirana, for example. In
fact, numerous experts confirmed that this latter corridor was added for purely political
reasons.
There was some competition between ECMT, UNECE and the European
Commission over the corridor process at the Pan-European Transport conference in
Crete, where the routes emerged more clearly. In the end, the Helsinki corridors still
remain very close to the so-called E- routes which were developed by UNECE. Work on
the Helsinki corridors continues until this day, mainly though what has become known as
the Pan-European partnership. After 1997, separate Memoranda of Understanding
(MOU) for the different corridors were concluded among the participating countries.
These MOUs were voluntary commitments and recommended, among other things, the
establishment of different steering committees for the various corridors. Since these
MOUs, which can be considered administrative rather than governmental decisions, thus
had no legal binding character, large differences in the efficiency of these cooperative
efforts became obvious. 9
Secretariats were particularly quickly established for Corridors
I and IV. Work on the Via Baltica corridor is especially advanced.
In early 2000, the TINA Office 10 prepared a status report on the Pan-European
Corridors and Transport Areas which estimated the total lengths of the corridors at
9 Until violent conflict was halted in the Balkans, MOUs could also not be signed for the entire lengths of
the corridors 6, 7, 8, and 10 since all these corridors cross the territory of the Former Yugoslavia. On
February 27, 2002 the MOU for the Danube corridor (VII) was signed in Brussels, leaving only the MOU
for Corridor VIII to Albania to be completed (
10 The TINA Secretariat was never officially linked to the European Commission. In fact, the TINA office
was founded in February 1997 under the name “Wiener Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment
Bürobetriebsges.m.b.H.” (WTB for short) and it is still a limited company under Austrian law. In the fall of