Transport and sustainability, with special regard to the EU Transport White Paper of 2011

Fleischer, Tamás (2011) Transport and sustainability, with special regard to the EU Transport White Paper of 2011. Documentation. Institute for World Economics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest.

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Abstract

The EU transport policy in 2001 took the environmental imperatives seriously and focused on curbing road transport. This brought strong reactions, and the 2006 reappraisal betrayed an intention of allowing that objective to atrophy. By contrast, the new White Paper appears to mark an environmental offensive, with aims of a 60 per cent cut in carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 and a fall in the use of traditional fuels in urban areas. The emission-reducing objective is coupled with ten development goals, but as a whole these reflect the results of the scenario analyses of the impact assessment only weakly, fail to further phased attainment of the goals, and in several places offer ill-considered, unverifiable criteria as targets. The valuable part of the document lies in the application of distinct transport segments at spatial levels that reflect the integrated transport outlook. These could, if developed more thoroughly, play an important part in future transport strategies. Still, the above chapters are the better elaborated parts of the White Paper. The other priority objective on attaining a Single European Transport Area, remains unsupported and is not in harmony with the sustainability conditions or the White Paper’s system of goals. Part of the reason is that this matter has never been maintained, re-examined or adjusted to conditions on the EU political side since the 1992 treaty, so that the objective as applied to transport services can only be pursued to a similarly rudimentary standard.

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