Freight carried by rail is up, in particular in eastern Europe. The figures, from the European railway companies’ umbrella organisation CER, coincide with a report highlighting ‘significant potential’ for a shift to rail to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.
Voters in central Switzerland have rejected a proposal for a second road tunnel through the Gotthard mountain.
A leading MEP has asked the Commission to stop Poland spending €1.2 billion of cohesion fund money on roads which has been given for improving rail transport.
The city of Zürich has updated its planning law to remove the obligation for builders of flats to provide car parking spaces.
The future of the D1 motorway through Slovakia has been put in doubt after the cancellation of a public-private partnership to provide €9 billion that was central to funding the road.
A new study has suggested that investing in high-speed rail can bring various benefits, but should not be marketed as a major part of efforts to combat climate change. The study, 'The Future of Interurban Passenger Transport' by the Swedish transport economist Per Kågeson, calculates the effect on emissions from building a new high speed line connecting two major cities 500 kilometres apart. It says there is no reason to prohibit investment in high-speed rail on environmental grounds as long as the carbon gains outweigh the emissions during construction, but the greenhouse gas savings are sufficiently small that it would be wrong to justify such investment as a solution to climate change.
The European Court of Justice has confirmed a decision made earlier this year that urban road building schemes are covered by EU environmental impact assessment rules and cannot be exempted by splitting them into several smaller projects.
The Commission should give at least 40% of transport infrastructure funding to rail projects in order to boost railfreight, says the European Parliament’s transport committee.
Work on the northern stretch of the M30 motorway around Madrid is being held up following an opinion from the European Court of Justice that says urban road schemes must be subjected to Environmental Impact Assessment.
Over a thousand protected nature areas in Europe are under serious threat from high-profile EU-funded transport infrastructure projects according to a new report by BirdLife International, RSPB and other environmental groups [1], which was presented in the European Parliament today.