PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Committee, i.e. well over half of the maximum ISPA transport grant volume to Poland
(or 62% of the mean total volume foreseen). Almost all of the projects approved so far
are international rail lines and expressways in Helsinki Corridors II and III. Interestingly,
there is one significant “joker” in the Polish ISPA list that has presented an important
counterweight to the strongly west-oriented expressway bias in road sector grant
allocations, and that is the axle load strengthening program. At € 496 million this “group
of projects” accounts for 30% of the entire road sector submissions. This final item on
the Polish ISPA projects list essentially presents a back door for funding all those
national roads that are part of the entire TINA network but which are not expressways on
the primary axes of the corridors. Many of these national roads run roughly parallel to
the planned future expressways foreseen as the final Helsinki corridor backbones, and
many carry increasingly heavy transit traffic. Some, however, are not congruent with the
expressway alignments. Note that a similar “joker” does not exist for the rail sector, so
that the bias for international transit lines is more pronounced. As far as the location of
the rail sector allocations is concerned, however, there is less of a “western” bias in the
allocations. As far as the balance between modes is concerned, there seems to have been
a conscious effort by both the Commission and the Polish counterparts to keep
allocations evenly balanced between the road and rail sector. Overall, the Polish ISPA
grant allocations appear as a relatively well-crafted, carefully worked out compromise
that displays a predictable prioritization of East-West oriented international transit
corridors.