PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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In Poland, internationally renowned senior-level traffic experts were equally critical of
the forecasts done by the Western consultants. Some of the NEA forecast models
supposedly predicted off-the-chart numbers such as train densities of over 200 trains per
day on the Berlin – Warsaw corridor. (Currently, there are about 4 international trains a
day.) As with most modeling exercises, small discrepancies in the used data can lead to
unrealistic results that need to be backed up by knowledgeable (national-level) expertise.
This was apparently not the case in this exercise.
At least as important as the questionability of the obtained results due to internal
miscalculations and incorrect parameter inputs is the fact that the overall extrapolation
method used, while seemingly rational within an overall eco-modernist discursive
framework that stresses growth, was based on the very same assumed relationship
between transport and growth that the EU’s own Sustainable Development Strategy
criticizes and seeks to remedy in the future. In other words: contrary to their own SDS,
which states that the EU will “decouple transport growth significantly from growth in
Gross Domestic Product” (Commission of the European Communities 2001a:12) in order
to “improve the transport system and land-use management,” the EU’s future needs
assessment for transport infrastructures in the candidate countries was based on a
traditional eco-modernist calculation that assumed a parallel development of GDP and
transport growth:
The basic economic data about the eleven countries for the base year 1995 were
provided by the NEA Study on “Traffic forecast on the 10 Pan-European Corridors of
Helsinki.” … In 1995, the eleven candidate countries had a population of 106 million
people …[and] they had an average per capita gross domestic product of about €
2,300 … These data constitute a starting point for extrapolations for the future. The
most important assumptions relate to economic growth in the countries. … Following
these assumptions [about a moderate growth scenario] the total produced GDP in the
candidate countries in the period 1998 to 2015 is about € 7.330 billion. …