PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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The total needs listed under TINA are enormous, and meeting the investment
schedule under the 2010 time horizon would involve spending more than 1.5% of the
country's GDP in some of the candidate countries. Senior Commission representatives
consider this a realistic and doable investment plan. They also pride themselves in
having lowered overly elevated infrastructure building cost estimates on the part of the
candidate countries sometimes by a factor of 3. 11
In the end, however, the high-profile
TINA exercise did not achieve full consensus in arriving at routing and infrastructure
investment decisions. The following sections investigate both the network alignment and
the needs assessment decision-making processes in more detail.
7.4.2 Continued Politicking: European versus National Interests
The final TINA maps are especially inconsistent with regard to the criterion of
linking up all TINA and TEN routes, largely for political reasons. A close inspection of
figures 7.4 and 7.5 reveals that four of the additional TINA road components as well as
one of the new rail lines on the Czech side have no continuation on the German and/or
Austrian sides (also see TINA 1999:27-28). Also, there was rather harsh criticism from
many of the CEE governmental representatives with regard to several of the elements
included in the final TINA report. The following comments, extracted from a series of
governmental statements included as Annex XIV to the Final TINA report, provide
telling insights as to some of the persistent disagreements apparent throughout the
process:
11 In the case of Poland, Commission-hired consultants supposedly found cost estimates for a variety of
road infrastructure schemes to be lower than Polish supplied data by a factor of 2.