PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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Contrary to the Southern section, there was opposition against the planned
Northern section of the M0 from the very start. The environmental impacts of the project
were expected to be much worse than those for the Southern section. It was also deemed
a less-necessary undertaking, so that the environmentalists also argued that this money
should be better spent on upgrading existing infrastructures, especially since Hungary
was and is still facing a very severe backlog in road maintenance even on key
international motorways. Along with environmental groups, two district municipalities in
Budapest and four nearby towns opposed the construction of the M0 on their territory.
Nevertheless, against strong local protests and as the environmentalists point out, “in
violation of several Hungarian laws,” the first part of the northern section between the
M3 motorway and the old road Nr. 2 was eventually completed, using part of the € 72
million loan from the EIB as well as part of the € 14.26 million from Phare.
The arguments of environmental and civic groups opposed to the construction of
the Northern section of the M0 were multiple. Yet not all of them carried equal weight in
the actual court cases. Interestingly, there was next to no way of effectively including
“sprawl” related arguments into the environmental and civic fight against it, since the
required standardized EU environmental assessment methodologies and cost benefit
analyses (which, given its candidate status, should now also be binding for Hungary) do
not require consideration of longer-term spatial effects. Consequently, the actual legal
case against the Northern section of the M0 reads much more like a classical NIMBY and
ecological activist case than it might have otherwise been. Not withstanding this nonapplicability
of additional sprawl arguments, the case brought forward by the
environmentalists shows how controversial the investment was.