For many Europeans, the vision of economic integration is as breathtaking as the 200-meter set of pylons that hoist the bridge’s central section nearly 60 meters above the sound. Oresund is nothing less than Euroland made concrete–which is exactly what Brussels had in mind back in 1996 when the EU approved a far-reaching plan to weld together Europe’s patchwork of national transport systems. The master plan showed a 400 billion euro network of new or upgraded roads, bridges, waterways, rail lines and airports, to be completed by 2010. The EU would pay for preparatory work and a sometimes hefty share of the construction bills. The goal: to link states on the EU’s margins with the center and boost efficiency. Better transport links would be the route to a cohesive, prosperous Europe, creating up to 1 million new jobs by 2030. “We have to have lasting mobility,” says Transport Commissioner Loyola de Palacio. “It’s a key element in the single market.” Imagine boarding a superspeed train from Stockholm to speed south across the Oresund Sound and down into Germany. “When people see that we’re building a link between Sweden and Denmark [or] a tunnel between France and Spain, Europe becomes much more than just an abstract idea,” says Louis Gallois, president of SNCF, the French railway. “When you pass a border at 300 kilometers an hour, borders just don’t exist anymore.”
Euroland’s engineers are thinking big. Take the 14 “priority” schemes–including the Oresund link–that top the EU list. By 2007 a network of high-speed rail lines will join Paris, Brussels, Cologne, Amsterdam and London. Before work is complete, contractors in the English town of Ashford–an important stop on the line–will have splurged on 260,000 cubic meters of concrete, enough to fill more than 100 Olympic swimming pools. New motorways are threading across Greece, connecting Athens to the Bulgarian border. Work has started on a 160-kilometer freight-only rail line that will carry up to 100 trains a day between Germany’s Ruhr district, the EU’s industrial heartland, and the Dutch port of Rotterdam. Within a few years British vacationers could be boarding direct trains from London to the French Riviera. Tunneling engineers can look forward to a particularly busy decade. The map of the Trans-European Transport network (as the Brussels master plan is called) features new tunnels through the Alps and the Pyrenees, under the city of Antwerp and a stretch of the central Netherlands.
The biggest winner is rail, with about 60 percent of the program’s EU budget. The new green orthodoxy demands that traffic be lured off the roads and airways and onto trains. That calls for the kind of speed that the latest generation of chisel-nosed supertrains can deliver. The proposed line from Madrid to Barcelona–later running north to meet the French rail network–will zip passengers across Spain at a world-beating 350 kph. Track now being laid between London and the Channel should trim 40 minutes off the trip to Brussels, narrowing the airlines’ lead on that route. Says Douglas Godden, a British economist sipping his beer in the departure lounge of the Eurostar rail service in Brussels: “The train is so much less hassle. If they can really do that I may never take the plane again.” So it’s back to a future on the railroads? Maybe. The high-speed London-Paris service–in competition with the airlines–has already bagged 60 percent of intercity traffic since opening in 1994.
The powerful road lobby resents all the attention lavished on trains. Maarten Labberton, who speaks for Europe’s road-haulage industry in Brussels, warns that if the EU grows by a steady 2 or 3 percent a year, transport needs will double in two decades–and says the railways won’t be able to cope with the growth alone. “Shifting from road to rail is only possible to a limited extent. You need investment in road and rail–not just one.” Besides, the trains still have problems, particularly with delays at frontier crossings. (No two European countries use the same signaling system or electric current, a problem freight services have still to overcome.) Despite some prodding from Brussels, the average consignment trundles across the EU at an average speed of just 17 kph.
Not that the deeper Greens are satisfied either. They’d prefer to discourage long-distance trade. What sense does it make to send trucks across the Continent carrying Bavarian milk to Greece to be made into feta cheese for re-export to northern Europe? Anyhow, they complain, shaving a few hours off journeys often won’t justify the likely damage from megaprojects. Says Frazer Goodwin of the Brussels-based European Federation for Transport and Environment, “There is a time delay in getting from one side of Paris to the other, but no one would think of putting a big highway through the center and bulldozing the Champs-Elysees.” Builders insist they’re listening. The French company building the last leg of the Paris-Marseilles high-speed line says it spent an extra 750,000 million euro–more than 20 percent of the total budget–to placate protesters. Measures included a detour to avoid an eagle sanctuary and using costly white cement to match the color of local rock.
Feelings run high where a new line brings no obvious benefit to locals. “The train isn’t even going to stop here,” grumbles Rudi Nevens, a florist in the Belgian town of Licent, now enduring three years of construction work on the Brussels-Cologne link. “We’ll just have to watch it pass us by all day.” Governments also complain. They’re happy enough to take EU money for railway lines or highways that bring political or economic rewards at home. (Many of the superprojects would have gone ahead even without EU funds.) But progress has been slow when the bills are steep–Brussels usually provides only a maximum of 10 percent of a project’s cost–and the returns look distant.
The biggest challenge is yet to come. The countries of central and eastern Europe are queuing up for EU membership. Among the consequences: a flood of extra traffic as they increase their trade with new partners to the west. Says Wolfgang Hager, a transport expert at the Brussels-based Centre for European Policy Studies, “Enlargement [of the EU] will be identified not just with dirty foreigners but with dirty foreigners in dirty trucks making it impossible for people to get to their holiday homes.” What’s more, the newcomers’ own infrastructure is in no state to take the extra loads that prosperity could bring. That’s why Brussels is channeling investment into another parallel network–20,000 kilometers of railways and almost the same distance in road–that will beef up links between Moscow and the Polish-German border. Will such outlay really be repaid in closer cross-border ties? As Frank Paaskesen, a Danish IT consultant heading home across Oresund Sound on the present hydrofoil service, says, “For us, having the link is like regaining a lost friend.” Spoken like a true European.
