PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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total possible of € 364 million). By the end of 2001, a total of € 191.49 million had been
allocated to the rail sector, accounting for 90% of all allocations until that time, and
already for 52% of the total possible, and for 63.3% of the mean allocated volume of
ISPA transport grants to Hungary. Together with one non-expressway axle load
strengthening project, these projects then accounted for 58% of the total possible, and
70% of the mean allocated volume for Hungary. No funds were approved for either
expressway development or access roads. Whether this record will be reversed in 2002
after the post-election restructuring of the Hungarian motorway agency remains to be
seen. 30 In Hungary, the EU encountered a situation where the Commission’s only last
option to ensure transparency in the allocation of funds (i.e. procedural sustainability),
namely to threaten to withhold grants for the road sector if international procurement
rules were not met, was more or less shrugged off by the recipient government, which
then decided to finance the respective highway sections on its own. One might argue that
by still providing grant funds to the rail sector, the EU might have thus “freed up”
additional governmental funds for the unaccountable road sector. However, choosing to
also withhold funds from the struggling rail sector at a time where this mode continued to
lose shares against road-based motorization also hardly seemed like a desirable choice.
As far as the overall “sustainability” of the EU’s grant funding in Hungary is concerned,
30 As far as medium- to long-term transport sector preferences of the new Hungarian government are
concerned, they are not likely to be different from their predecessors. In their renewed ambitiousness, they
clearly recall post-war German autobahn projects. As Benkö (2002) reported in mid-August 2002:
Economy and Transport Minister István Csillag said [that] …. the proposals will be based on the
previous government’s medium-term and long-term road building programs. “As part of the pan-
European network, a primary goal of Hungary’s transport policy by 2015 is to build a freeway network
from border to border, crossing the country from north to south and east to west, with a density that
ensures access to the nearest motorway or principal road in half an hour from any point of the
country,” reads the plan that the ministry will submit to the government. [Emphasis added]