PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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10.2.3 Realities: EU Transport Investments in Central Eastern Europe
Taking the above described contradictions and biases in EU transport investment
rationales as their starting point, Part III analyzed EU transport infrastructure decisionmaking
in the particular context of Eastern enlargement. The key objective of this
“realities” part of the study was to identify to what degree conflicts of interests
surrounding particular infrastructure investments could be related back to different
underlying investment rationales. The ensuing analysis of transport sector decisionmaking
in CEE of course had to be seen in context with the collapse of Communism in
that region, and with the transformation from centrally planned to market economies.
Socialism’s legacy of non-market infrastructures, land-uses and (intra-urban) population
densities included large, publicly-owned and -subsidized public transit systems on one
hand, and road networks which were comparatively modest in size and relatively
undifferentiated on the other. Significant backlogs in infrastructure and equipment
maintenance were built up during the 1980s. National and local governments now
struggle with rising levels of traffic congestion, noise, accidents, and pollution in
urbanized areas, and with ill-maintained and inappropriate urban, regional and longdistance
transport infrastructure systems. Under such conditions, the pursuit of
sustainable transport infrastructure decision-making appeared a particularly daunting
task. Additionally, I also anticipated that shifting political powers and insufficiently or
inefficiently distributed decisional responsibilities at the national level would further
exacerbate the challenge of multi-location policy-making for the EU stakeholders.
In Chapter 7, I concentrated on the Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment
(TINA) for CEE. In the end, this process of drawing-up and calculating the costs for an