PLANNING FOR A SUSTAINABLE EUROPE? - TU Berlin

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brought forward not only by many of the environmental NGOs working on these issues,
but also by key policy experts both in Brussels and in the CEE countries themselves.
On a pragmatic level, the Commission could strive to creatively address this bias
either by revising the ISPA rules and regulations or by attempting to provide Phare
“regional development” grants for urban transit systems. More generally, the EU should
strive to play a more modally-balanced and possibly more involved role in urban
transport matters. The finalization of the long-promised Green Paper on Urban Transport
would be a useful first step in this direction.
10.4.3 Integrated, Intermodal Thinking Instead of Bottleneck Fixing
Refocusing attention on urban transport problems should not mean sticking with
the kind of “bottleneck” rhetoric championed in the EU’s new White Paper on Transport
(Commission of the European Communities 2001f), because, somewhat ironically, the
urban dimension is already over-emphasized when it comes to justifying highway
expansions. Mateo Turro (1999:27) concisely summarized the problem as follows:
Most Motorway traffic in Europe is of local and regional character. A purely demandled
planning exercise would not pay enough attention to long- distance and,
particularly, international travel, so a large share of the investment in motorways
would be directed, as in the past, to relieving congestion created by short-distance
traffic. Although this traffic created bottlenecks that affect transport crossing
congested urban areas, the long-term solution for interurban traffic can only be found
in a wider geographical context.
In other words: Motorway traffic problems that are mostly home-made (i.e.
created at the local level) sometimes receive an unfair boon of national and international
funding simply because the congested areas happen to also affect international or national
travel. This scenario is confirmed by the Budapest ring road which according to experts