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7.4 The Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) for CEE
7.4.1 From Politically-Defined Corridors to an Assessed Network?
In order to put the politicized process of corridors prioritization on an ostensibly
more scientific and more objective footing, the European Commission, in cooperation
with the candidate states, and with financial assistance from the EU Phare Program and
the City of Vienna, launched the “Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment” process.
Even the European Commission itself readily admitted that the original Helsinki
Corridors largely reflected EU strategic interests. Stakeholders agreed that a larger needs
assessment for the candidate countries was necessary. The first official mention of a
Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA) for the CEE candidate countries
process was made at the first structured dialogue between the European Union Transport
Council (of Ministers) and the relevant transport ministers of the candidate countries in
1995. At the time, the main goal was an identification of the transport-sector investments
required to bring transport infrastructures in CEE countries up to EU standards and to
ensure adequate linkage between CEE and EU infrastructures. More importantly for the
candidate countries, they realized that if the Helsinki Corridors were to become the main
basis for identifying infrastructure projects that were of “common interest,” many of their
national priority projects might not be eligible for funding within the EU’s emerging preaccession
grant framework.
The TINA process therefore had two underlying motivations which were often
incongruent with each other: on one hand, TINA was to present a retroactive, supposedly
de-politicized justification for the already selected priority routes by presenting data on
future traffic flows and “bottlenecks”. On the other hand, TINA was also supposed to