EUROPEAN TRANSPORT SYSTEMS 1990–2010
What have been the trends and what are the prospects for European transport systems?
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Strong economic expansion is hard to imagine without transport that works efficiently. Today's information technologies, by enabling teleworking and online services, can trim the need to move people and goods physically; even so, demand for transport keeps climbing. Two forces drive this. For passengers, what matters most is the extraordinary rise in private car use: across the roads of the European Union (EU), the fleet grew by close to four million vehicles a year between 1990 and 2010, and a further sizeable rise is expected over the coming decade.
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When it comes to freight, much of the increase traces to shifts in Europe's economy and in the way goods are produced. Over the past two decades the removal of internal borders has carried the EU from a 'stock' model towards a 'flow' one. Reinforcing this, certain industries — labour-intensive ones above all — have moved production elsewhere in search of lower costs, often leaving the manufacturing site hundreds, sometimes thousands, of kilometres from where final assembly happens or from the people who will use the product.
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Robust growth is also forecast in the states now applying to join the EU, adding further to transport flows, road freight most of all. By 1996 several were already exporting almost three times their 1990 volumes, while their imports had climbed beyond six times the 1990 figure. Many applicant states inherited networks built around the railways, yet since the early 1990s the split between modes has swung heavily towards the road. Road haulage grew by 22.6 per cent between 1990 and 1996, whereas rail freight fell by 39.8 per cent, though rail there still runs, on average, well above the levels seen in current member states.
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A fresh priority — sustainable development — now opens the way to reshaping the EU's common transport policy. Endorsed at the Aveiro European Council, the aim is to be reached by weaving environmental thinking into Community policy, with altering the balance among transport modes at its centre. Full delivery of so ambitious an aim will not be possible before 2025; even so, the proposed measures mark a necessary first move toward a sustainable transport system that ought, a generation from now — by 2045 — to be running.
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Back in 1996 the energy burned in transport was responsible for 31 per cent of emissions of CO2, the foremost greenhouse gas. Recent projections suggest that, if the upward trend in traffic goes unchecked, transport's CO2 output will swell by roughly 45 per cent, reaching 1,038 billion tonnes by 2025 against the 716 billion tonnes logged in 1990. Here again the chief offender is road transport, generating on its own 86 per cent of the CO2 that transport releases. Turning to alternative fuels and raising energy efficiency is therefore at once an environmental obligation and a technological challenge.
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Why the transport balance must be corrected.
Alongside this, much more must be done to bring about a shift between modes. No such change can happen from one day to the next, least of all after more than fifty years in which the balance has slid steadily the way of the road. Matters have gone so far that rail freight is now pushed to the margins, holding a mere 9 per cent of the market, while cross-border goods trains crawl at an average of just 16 kilometres an hour. From this, three broad options have taken shape.
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Under the first option, road transport alone would be tackled, purely through pricing, with nothing done in parallel to strengthen the other modes. For a while this might hold back road traffic's rise, since dearer transport tends to raise how fully lorries are loaded and how many passengers each car carries. The problem is that, without any accompanying effort to revive the other modes, the more sustainable alternatives would have no way to step in and take over.
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The second option likewise leans on charging for road use, but this time alongside steps to make the other modes work better — through improved service quality, smarter logistics and new technology. What it omits is any spending on fresh infrastructure, and it gives no assurance of stronger cohesion between regions. It could loosen the tie between road growth and economic growth rather more than the first, yet the road would still hold the largest share of traffic and keep clustering along overloaded routes, for all that it pollutes more than any other mode. On its own, then, it cannot secure the change of balance needed.
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The third option is not a novelty. It brings together a whole range of measures, from pricing at one end to reviving the alternative modes and channelling investment into the trans-European network of railways and waterways at the other. Integrated in this way, it would let the other modes recover the market shares they held in 1996 and so tip the balance back. Given fifty years of built-in bias toward the road, it is far bolder than it looks; even so, it would sharply break the link between growth in road traffic and economic growth, without curbing the freedom of people and goods to move.
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Question 1 - 8
From the list of headings below choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph.
List of heading
Relying on pricing alone to limit road transport
The surge in privately owned vehicles
The rising expense of moving goods by rail
Combining road charges with better alternative services
An important new aim for the years ahead
Proposals for building large new road systems
Transport patterns in states hoping to join the Union
The pollution caused by traffic on roads
Adopting every measure needed to redirect transport
How production changes have altered the movement of freight