PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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transport sector and to commit to a multi-year strategy (thereby making Polish transport
policy more future-oriented, internally consistent and better integrated across sectors),
Hungarian officials saw the writing of the strategy mostly as a necessary document to
receive supplementary financial aid from Brussels. In Hungary, grave violations of
international procurement rules in the national expressway program resulted in road
sector projects being rejected by the ISPA management committee, but the government
simply rearranged their ISPA strategy and excluded the problematic motorways from the
list. The highly unusual 90% imbalance in favor of rail in the Hungarian ISPA program
therefore had to be seen in the context of a continued bias in favor of road projects both
in terms of national government funding and IFI loans. Railway projects in CEE
typically require a broader sectoral approach involving difficult questions of overall
restructuring, and are frequently more complicated to justify in terms of strict financial
and economic rates of return. However, contrary to previous EU-led funding in the
region, ISPA allocations have so far been rather evenly balanced between the road and
the rail sectors, with over half of all grants going to rail projects. Overall, program
decisions seemed still rather strongly influenced by the EU’s DG Regio. In both cases,
DG Regio placed a near exclusive emphasis on funding major corridors facing the EU
borders and was reluctant to consider non-Helsinki corridor TINA network stretches for
initial funding. In the end, the EU favors an accession-oriented focus on international
links without necessarily relying on existing traffic flows or current market demand. Key
international transport experts find that this exclusive focus on international links is
misguided.