Jessica Doyle

“It is now widely recognized,” began a 2000 book, “that transport in Europe is unsustainable, and that the trend-based path of continuous and continuing growth is unacceptable” (Banister et al., 2000). From an American perspective, European transport growth seems considerably less unsustainable and unacceptable than similar growth in the United States. In 2004, the European Union’s (hereafter EU) current and prospective members had a population of 451 million, to the United States’s 286 million, but just 212 million cars to 205 million cars in the United States (Schade et al., 2006). Cities such as London, Paris, Madrid, and Prague are known for their extensive public transit systems, while other cities, most notably Amsterdam, are famous for their hospitality to bicyclists. Europe’s rail network is far more extensive than Amtrak, the American counterpart. Although air travel in Europe has increased considerably in the last decade, the majority of journeys of six hours or less, and business journeys of four hours or less, within Europe are made by rail (The Economist, 2007b). Not surprisingly, American planners sometimes look to European urban areas as potential role models for encouraging nonautomotive modes of transport.

Nevertheless, the harmful environmental impacts of transport remain a concern in Europe. As of December 2007, only eleven of the twenty-seven current members of the EU were expected to meet emission ceilings for four pollutants by 2010 (European Environment Agency, 2007a). In 1998, an estimated 28 percent of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from Europe were transport based; four-fi fths of those emissions came from road transport (European Commission, 2001). The environmental costs of transport are estimated at 1.1 percent of the combined GDP of all EU members (CEC, 2006). Sixty-seven million Europeans are believed to be exposed to harmful noise levels related to transport (EEA, 2009). Between 1990 and 2006, greenhouse gas emissions from thirty-two European countries actually declined in most sectors, including industry, but grew by 26 percent from domestic transport (European Environment Agency, 2009).

Even more worrisome, from a purely environmental standpoint, is the growth in road transport, both passenger and freight, in the twelve countries that have joined the EU since 2004 (the EU-12 ¹). With Soviet-era rail networks decaying and standards of living rising, the residents of the EU-12, primarily in eastern Europe, are increasingly buying, and relying on, cars.²  Thus, as in the United States, there is concern in Europe about the environmental costs of growing use of transport.

Responses to such concerns, however, are complicated by the way transport planning is handled in Europe. Although the 1957 Treaty of Rome, which founded what is now known as the EU, called for a common transport policy, transport planning has largely been handled on a national level. The largest change in European transport planning since the early 1990s has been the EU taking on the job of preparing and recommending a common transport policy, which it has done in the form of the Trans-European Transport Networks (TENs-T). One of the primary goals of the TENs-T has been to allow for growth in transport use while reducing the potential harms to the natural environment. More recently, the EU has introduced the Marco Polo program, which also aims to reduce environmental harms by encouraging shifts to less harmful transport modes. 

This paper will examine how the European Union has incorporated concern over harmful environmental impacts into region-wide transport planning. It will examine the TENs-T projects and the Marco Polo program in light of how they help to advance EU environmental goals of reducing environmental harms caused by transport. It will then examine public critiques, focusing on environmental impacts, of EU transport planning efforts. Finally, it will examine what lessons there may be for regional transport planning in the United States.

Environmental impacts of European transport

Literature on the environmental impacts of European transport, including official reports from the European Union, have been relatively wide-ranging in their scope, concerned not only with GHG emissions or air pollution but with a broader number of potential threats to quality of life. In the 2001 report “A Sustainable Europe for a Better World” (CEC, 2001), the European Commission identified the main threats to sustainable development as GHG emissions from human activity, poverty, the aging of the population, antibioticresistant strains of diseases, threats to food safety, the loss of biodiversity, and transport congestion. The 2006 Renewed EU Sustainable Development Strategy (SDS) grouped climate change; threats to public health, poverty, and social exclusion; demographic pressure and aging; the disappearance of natural resources and biodiversity; and changes in land use and transport as threats to future sustainable development (CEU, 2006). The 2006 midterm report on sustainable mobility (CEC, 2006) named CO2 emissions, air quality, noise pollution, and land use as primary environmental concerns. Air pollution, in the form of particulate matter, is blamed for an estimated 350,000 annual premature deaths in Europe (CEC, 2006).

In European transport literature, the primary environmental concern is CO2 emissions. With road freight transport expected to grow by an estimated annual 20.5 billion t-km (tons per kilometer) in the EU-25 between 2007 and 2013 (Millán de la Lastra, 2007), increasing CO2 emissions will likely continue to be the most-discussed environmental impact of European transport movements. The 2006 SDS names reducing greenhouse-gas emissions from transport as an operational objective, to be fulfilled by holding new car fl eets to higher emissions standards, shifting transport from road to more environmentally friendly modes, and developing an EU fuel strategy (CEU, 2006).

The EU and its member states are signers to the Kyoto Protocol (UNFCCC, 2007). The target for the EU-15 is an 8 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, compared to 1990 levels, by 2008-2012 (CEU, 2006). In March 2007 the EU announced plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions even further, to 20 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. We can reasonably expect, then, that reducing CO2 emissions will remain an EU-level policy goal over the next decade.

But meeting such targets will be difficult. Many member states are expected to meet those targets by buying credits in emission-reductions programs in developing countries (The Economist, 2007a). Furthermore, some European leaders have pointed to potential tension between economic development strategies and environmental protection regulations, particularly in the context of a Europe-wide recession. In January 2008 Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president, argued in a letter to José Manuel

Barroso, president of the European Commission, that industry would shift to countries with less stringent environmental standards, costing France jobs (Hollinger et al., 2008). In February 2009, Günter Verheugen, a German politician serving as the EU’s Commissioner for Enterprise and Industry, stated publicly, “We should do everything possible now to stimulate the economy . . . anything else has to wait,” and criticized recent EU environmental legislation: “We have made the European car much more expensive” (Der Spiegel, 2009). Transport will be affected if the EU is to meet its greenhouse gas emission-reduction goals. Hickman and Banister (2007) conducted a series of “backcasting” scenarios to determine what policy measures Britain would need to meet its 2030 CO2 emission-reduction goals. Their analysis predicted that technological innovation on its own would not be enough to offset increased emissions from additional population and travel growth; travel behavior would also have to change. At an EU level, Rodenburg, Ubbels, and Nijkamp (2002) tested three hypothetical EU transport policy scenarios, one aimed at enhancing mobility, one at minimizing environmental damage, and one at improving social and economic quality of life. Not surprisingly, the package of policies aimed at minimizing environmental damage produced a decrease in CO2 emissions, while the mobility package saw the largest increase. The quality-of-life package also lessened emissions, although not as much as the environmental package. They concluded cautiously that, while reducing emissions yet allowing for economic growth presented “formidable policy challenges,” making changes in policy and transport systems “might offer possibilities to make a step forward in a more sustainable direction.”

Despite concerns voiced at the national level, the EU seems to have embraced the idea that it must create policy to influence travel and transport decision making. The TENs-T initiative is one of the largest initiatives; the Marco Polo program, while less ambitious, is also significant for its emphasis on freight transport.

EU transport policy initiatives: the TENs-T and MARCO POLO

Transport planning at the EU level is not a new concept. The 1957 Treaty of Rome called for the establishment of “trans-European networks” in transport, telecommunications, and energy. It made the interoperability of national networks and called for what was then called the European Economic Community to “. . . take account in particular of the need to link island, landlocked and peripheral regions with the central regions of the Community” (EEC, 1957). Yet for years the EEC, which would become the European Community and later the EU, was unwilling to move toward a common transport policy (European Commission, 2001). The member states have traditionally handled transport policy as a national concern. Given that transport policy is by definition more spatially grounded than, say, monetary policy (the power over which many members, Britain and Denmark among them, still refuse to grant the EU), it is not surprising that transport planning has by and large been determined within national borders.

Beginning in the early 1990s, however, the EU began to assert the need for a common transport policy. This was in part due to the growing awareness of the disproportionate environmental harms of certain transport modes. When the 2001 white paper was written, road transport accounted for 44 percent of the EU’s goods transport market and 79 percent of its passenger transport market (European Commission, 2001). By 2007, after enlargement, the latter fi gure had risen to 81 percent (EUROPA, 2007). The commission now looks to add environmental awareness into all its policies (Faludi and Waterhout, 2002), including transport planning. The 2001 white paper on European transport policy describes sustainable development as a “lever” toward a common transport policy (European Commission, 2001).

The EU regards transport policy, economic growth, and sustainability as interlinked: more growth will mean more demands on transport infrastructure, which could in turn mean more environmental harm if the environment is not taken into consideration well in advance of growth. Thus, concerns about environmental impacts have led the EU toward regionwide transport planning.

TENs-T So far the most ambitious EU initiative toward a common transport policy has been the Trans-European Transport Networks (TENs-T). The TENs-T are a series of transport infrastructure projects, mostly multinational, proposed by the EU to facilitate the movement of people and goods within the entire EU. The TENs-T are considered a crucial factor in enhancing the growth and economic competitiveness within Europe (European Commission, 2005). Moreover, the TENs-T are expected to help “ensure sustainable transport” (European Commission, 2005) by increasing options within the transport network, decreasing congestion, and shifting both passenger and freight traffic from road to other environmentally friendly modes. More than half of the proposed projects are solely, or primarily, structured around new or upgraded light rail systems.

The TENs-T proposals currently consist of thirty projects (in Figure 1), of which two have been completed. The total cost of completing all thirty projects was estimated in 2008 to be Ð397 billion (European Commission, 2008).

Ross (1998) described the TENs-T initiative as “groundbreaking,” not only in terms of its scope, but in terms of the EU’s ambitions, in funding transport initiatives directly and in doing transport planning across borders. Both aspects have made it difficult for the EU to move forward on the TENs-T. The EU, which is financed by tax collections from member states, can use a portion of its funds to finance TENs-T projects in less wealthy member states; a total of Ð6.7 billion was committed thus in 2004–06 (European Commission, 2005). But the EU cannot bear the total cost: Ð224 billion roughly equals its entire budget for two years.

In presenting the TENs-T in 2005, Jacques Barrot, then–vice president of the European Commission with responsibility for transport, complained that member states had decreased their transport infrastructure spending, in many cases to less than 1 percent of national GDP (European Commission, 2005).

Similarly, van Exel et al. (2002) describe an “investment inertia” that occurs when the benefits of the TENs-T occur at a European-wide level; national transportation departments find these benefits hard to quantify, and thus the TENs-T become less of a funding priority at the national level. In short, the EU may have difficulty building the TENsT, given the discrepancy between the funding sources and the recipients of potential benefits. A 2008 report pushed back the potential completion dates of nine of the thirty projects to 2020 and one, a railway axis from Lyon, France, to the Ukrainian border, to 2025 (European Commission, 2008).

The EU positions the TENs-T as creating less environmentally harmful connections for both passenger and freight travel on a European scale. However, the evidence that the TENs-T will reduce CO2 emissions and other negative environmental impacts is not unambiguous. The 2003 TEN-STAC scenario findings (NEA Transport Research and Training BV, 2003) suggest that emissions will be cut in some of the larger Western European countries, but continue to rise in several of the fast-growing EU-12 states (see Figure 2). Meanwhile, Banister et al. (2000) point out two difficulties with high-speed rail, which is the primary mode in more than half of the planned TENs-T projects. One is that, to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from road transport, light rail must draw would-be drivers from the road. If rail passenger transport grows while road passenger transport stays constant, the EU will have cut some of the future CO2 emission growth, but the rail built by TENs-T projects will not have been as effective in curbing emissions as if there were a decrease in road passenger traffic. The other difficulty is that in encouraging travel by long distances (the completion of the Rail Baltica project, for example, would allow passenger travel along high-speed rail from London to Tailinn), the TENs-T rail projects may, in the long run, stimulate demand for air travel.

Marco Polo A newer EU-level program is Marco Polo, which was first proposed in 2002 and adopted in 2003. The primary goal of the Marco Polo program is to shift freight transport from roads to modes considered more environmentally friendly—short sea shipping, inland waterways, and rail—while improving intermodal freight operations (Horn and Nemoto, 2005). During the 2007–13 budgetary period, Marco Polo³ has roughly €450 million ($588 million) to provide for eligible projects (DG TREN, 2006). Table 1, below, shows the differences in focus between the larger TENs-T program and the Marco Polo program.

The chief difference between the two programs is that Marco Polo focuses exclusively on freight transport. The EU has singled out freight movements for two reasons: because freight growth has shown steady increases and because so much of freight transport is moved by roads, considered the most environmentally harmful mode of transport (in terms of air pollution and GHG emissions). The total volume of freight transported in the EU, measured by ton-kilometers, increased by 35 percent between 1996 and 2006 (European Environment Agency, 2009). In the EU-15, road freight transport grew by 35 percent, while short sea shipping grew by 31 percent, inland waterway freight activity by 9 percent, and rail freight transport by 6 percent (Millán de la Lastra, 2006). By 2020, 45 percent of freight within the EU-25 (the EU save Romania and

Bulgaria) is expected to be carried by road (Millán de la Lastra, 2006). Thus EU policy makers believe that achieving modal shift on freight transport will lead directly to benefits in the form of lower CO2 emissions. Projects, or “actions,” financed by Marco Polo fall into five categories. One, “modal shift” actions, have been described as “robust, but not innovative” (Millán de la Lastra, 2007). They are projects drawing on prior knowledge and research to shift freight transport away from roads. “Catalyst” actions are expected to be more technologically innovative, while “common learning” actions are to help member states share best practices as to intermodal freight movement. In 2005, Marco Polo also began fi nancing initiatives related to the “motorways of the sea” project, to promote inland shipping, and “traffic avoidance” actions, meant to, among other goals, reduce the number of empty runs by freight vehicles. Table 2 shows the differences in funding allowances for the three types of actions.

Public Critiques of EU Transport Policy

With nearly 400 million people affected by EU policy decisions, it would be naive to expect that such large-scale projects as the TENs-T would go uncriticized. What may be of interest to American transport and environmental planners is that, even as they have been framed in the context of greater environmental concern and efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on the EU’s part, the TENs-T and other infrastructure projects have been criticized not only on economic or transport planning grounds, but on environmental grounds.

One example of heavy debate between the EU and environmental groups is the arguments over the Betuwe Line, TEN-T Priority Axis #5 (see Figure 3). Consisting largely of upgrades of existing track, the project was primarily intended to create a 160-km (99.4-mi) rail link between the port of Rotterdam and the German-Dutch border. Doing so, argued the EU, would enhance Rotterdam’s status as a European transport and distribution hub, and provide a nonroad option for transport into and out of the port (European Commission, 2005). The 2005 TEN-T report predicts that “the shift from road to rail will be particularly significant along the route of the A15 line” (European Commission, 2005), which runs from Rotterdam to Nijmegen, a city near the border. Thus the EU could argue, and has argued, that the conception and construction of the Betuwe line is an example of a top-down strategy of promoting modal shifts to reduce harmful environmental impacts.

However, the Betuwe line, which opened in June 2007, has been strongly criticized by environmental nongovernmental organizations and activist groups since plans were first announced in 1991 (van der Heijden, 2006). Early criticisms were led by VLOB⁴, an association formed by twenty-one different residents’ organizations in neighborhoods scheduled to be affected by the line’s creation. The environmental activist group SNM⁵, a branch of the larger nongovernmental organization European Federation for Transport and the Environment (T&E), initially cautiously welcomed the switch from road to rail transport, but later turned against the project, arguing that the Dutch and European governments were not doing enough to make rail freight transport competitive and abate noise pollution (van der Heijden, 2006).

In June 2007 T&E published an editorial by Willem-Jan von Grondelle, a representative on SNM, summarizing the group’s arguments against the Betuwe line: The government had always made it sound so good: a freight rail link as a means of relieving the environmental impact of growing road transport. But by the early 1990s a variety of studies had demonstrated that in reality things would pan out rather differently. By providing a new track back to the German hinterland, what the Betuwe line would achieve most was improved competitiveness for the Port of Rotterdam. . . . Apart from anything else, a green transport option from Rotterdam to the hinterland already existed: river barges along the Rhine. . . . Although it now has a number of tunnels and other measures to reduce noise and ecological and landscape impacts (to some extent), there has been no effort to provide the sustainability-oriented freight transport policy the Netherlands so badly needs. . . . It is not what one would call a showcase environmental project. (European Federation for Transport and Environment, 2007b)

These criticisms of the Betuwe line have taken place within the context of broader critiques of the TENs-T and of European transport policy in general. As van der Heijden (2006) writes, “By linking TENs to climate politics, habitat conservation, the preferred kind of economic growth and the very grounds for mobility, these groups [such as T&E] have opened up the discussion on the desirability of individual TENs.”

Such clashes can also be seen over the expansion of European ports and the development of the “motorways of the sea” included in the TENs-T. The EU, through the TENs-T and MARCO POLO, has promoted shifting cargo from road to sea as a way of decreasing environmental damage. But Psaraftis (2005) points out that it will be difficult to expand and maintain European ports in the face of high environmental and security standards. The creation of a potential container terminal in Dibden Bay, United Kingdom, was dropped in 2004 on environmental grounds, following a yearlong public inquiry (Psaraftis, 2005). A shipping-consulting fi rm has estimated that the average European port expansion delay because of environmental concerns is four years (Miller, 2007). In Belgium, an expansion of the Port of Antwerp had been delayed by three years, as of 2007, because of a group of activists fi ghting the destruction of Doel, a seventeenth-century village (Miller, 2007).

The arguments over ports, like the arguments over the Betuwe line, show how the EU and its critics frame the environmental impacts of transport projects differently. The EU, trying to combine environmental concerns with economic expansion, argues for the creation of more transport infrastructure, albeit less environmentally harmful infrastructure. European environmental activists, however, decry the need for both the infrastructure and the economic growth. A Dutch representative of Friends of the Earth, an environmental activism group, stated in regard to ports that “Europe just needs to buy less from Asia” (Miller, 2007). If environmental stewardship in the EU becomes seen as not simply  redirecting growth but halting or reversing it, then the EU will find it difficult to convince its citizens that it incorporates environmental concerns into its transport policies.

Another line of criticism is not directed specifically at any one project, but at the goals of EU transport policy in general: namely, that it attempts to accomplish three mutually exclusive goals, in promoting economic growth, slowing or reducing harmful environmental impacts, and promoting “cohesion,” which is to say decreasing economic disparities within Europe. The last has been promoted as a goal ever since Spain and Portugal, then considerably poorer than the average EU member, joined the EU in 1986, and has increased since the admission of ten new countries in 2004 and two more in 2007. But reducing economic disparities, while maybe having social and economic benefits for Europeans, will not necessarily lead to reduced environmental impacts. Walz, Schade, and Doll summarize the confl ict neatly:

Cohesion policies are imperative to combat regional disparities. If successful, these policies result in a greater dispersion of economic activities within Europe, and counteract the centralization of activities. This gives rise to additional transportation needs, and transportation policies must accommodate these additional needs—resulting in additional CO2 emissions. (Walz, Schade, and Doll, 2007, 92)

They conclude that if the EU is to reconcile its economic and environmental goals, it should focus less on infrastructure building and more on promoting “green” transport innovations (Walz, Schade, and Doll, 2007).

The existence of the cohesion goal means that in the EU, growth in transport demand is linked not only to economic growth in the EU as a whole, but in areas lagging economically. Table 3 lists the thirty TENs-T projects, the countries in which they are set, and the funding awarded by the EU in November 2007. Those countries with an annual GDP of less than 90 percent of the EU average, and thus receiving EU funds meant to promote economic cohesion—the EU-12, plus Greece and Portugal⁶—are highlighted in bold.

Table 3 shows that, while nearly half of the funding went to projects involving cohesion countries, so much of the TEN-T activity is concentrated in southwest Europe that the percentage drops to under 30 percent if Portugal is removed. Indeed, a T&E press release on the 2007 funding pointed specifically to the lack of money awarded to two motorway projects largely in cohesion countries, Projects #7 and #25 (European Federation for Transport and Environment, 2007a). As we have noted, one of the largest environmental concerns at the EU level is the growth in road transport in the EU-12. It would not be surprising if the fi nancing trends of 2007 continue in the near future, with rail projects given higher priority over road projects. The question would be, then, whether such prioritizing would lead to less investment going to the less wealthy new members, undermining the EU’s “cohesion” goal.

Meanwhile, only four of the EU-12 countries—Hungary, Poland, Czech Republic, and Romania—were involved in the fi fteen projects selected for funding under the 2006 round of Marco Polo selections (Millán de la Lastra, 2006). In the near future, Marco Polo funding will likely continue to be skewed toward the original fi fteen EU members, since there is greater freight activity in the wealthier member states. Again, however, the EU may find it politically difficult to balance its goals of enhancing the economic growth of its less-developed member states and of reducing the environmental harms caused by transport.

Finally, the 2006 ECORYS report, which looked at transport investment priorities and funds to promote economic and social cohesion, suggests that the twin goals of environmental sustainability and decreasing regional disparities may not be as compatible as EU policy makers would like. Comparing two different scenarios, one with maximum investment in road projects identified in the EU-12 plus Spain, Portugal, and Greece, and one with maximum investment in rail projects, some of the EU-12 would see greater increases in GDP per capita from the former. The results are summarized in Table 4.

The ECORYS analysis also suggests that the EU-12 will need sufficient funding to maintain their road networks (ECORYS, 2006). Such efforts would, again, run contrary to the EU’s efforts to promote modal shift. Improving the road network in the EU-12, even if it helps with economic growth in the short term, runs the risk of further entrenching the car as a mode of transport in those countries— and the resulting emissions. And yet refusing to fund road projects, if it is not combined with careful management of rail investment, risks stunting economic growth in the poorest part of the EU.

Conclusions

With federal transportation funding up for reauthorization in 2011, the United States will again see a debate as to optimal funding of transportation projects. This debate will likely be conducted in a context of concern about climate change and the harmful effects of CO2 and other greenhouse gases. Given the European Union’s having been more willing than the United States to factor climate change concerns into planning and policy making, some American policy makers and commentators will look to the EU as a potential model. This paper has examined the ways in which the EU has incorporated concerns about environmental impacts, specifically CO2 emissions, into transport policy, specifically with the TENs-T and Marco Polo projects. It has also discussed how these policy projects have been received in the EU, and why environmental activists have not necessarily applauded the EU for its stated commitment to decrease the growth of CO2 emissions.

As we have seen, the EU has, much more explicitly than the United States, addressed goals of reducing CO2 emissions in its transport planning and policy. However, it is not clear that the EU can use the TENs-T to promote its three main goals—reducing environmental harms of transport, encouraging economic growth, and promoting socioeconomic cohesion—simultaneously. Banister et al. (2000) and the white paper (2001) both called for the “decoupling” of transport growth and economic growth, but so far the EU has not been able to make much progress in this area, and the “decoupling” goal was largely dropped from the 2006 Mid-term Review (European Environment Agency, 2007b). Moreover, a critique often voiced in European environmental discussions sees environmental preservation and economic growth as directly opposed to each other. Future infrastructure projects, even if the EU presents them as the least harmful of several alternatives, may be rejected by a polity worried that any contributions to growth can only result in further environmental damage. The TENs-T, although formulated at the EU level, are funded at the national level, and thus may be defeated by member states concerned that the EU, for all its leadership, does not place a high enough priority on the environment as opposed to economic growth. Is there a way out of this dilemma? New technologies, such as zero-emission vehicles or cleaner light rail locomotives, may help. Horn and Nemoto (2005) express a cautious optimism that the Marco Polo program, aimed at the private sector, may be able to promote and fund technological advances in intermodal freight transport. Meanwhile, Walz, Schade, and Doll (2007) suggest that the EU can establish a global competitive advantage in the development of green technological innovations. But Marco Polo has been controversial within the European Parliament (Psaraftis, 2005) and is a fairly small amount of funding to bear the burden of stimulating technological development. A suggestion more frequently heard (e.g., Banister et al., 2000) is to externalize the costs of road transport in the form of road pricing. Road pricing was originally meant as the source of funding for many of the TENs-T projects (Ross, 1998), but to date has not been implemented at the EU level or at the national level in any EU member state. The 2006 Mid-term Review called for the European Commission to create a model for calculating external costs for future infrastructure pricing projects by mid-June 2008 (CEC, 2006).

The final question is what lessons American transportation and environmental planners can learn from the EU’s example. One apparent obstacle faced by the EU but not by the United States is the former’s historical lack of a designated federal role in transportation planning. Unlike the EU, whose members are still national governments asserting national priorities, the United States Department of Transportation still controls federal transportation spending, which it can use to promote or discourage certain transportation policies at the state level. As with the European countries, so the American states will find it difficult to coordinate on projects where benefits within state borders are not immediately apparent, but there is precedent for a coordinated, federally led transport policy initiative—the creation of the interstate highway system in the 1950s. The EU’s difficulty in coordinating its own environmental regulations with the differing goals of its members suggests that the United States, if it were to adopt a similar approach, would need to assert and enforce such a policy at the federal level, with federal dollars.

The antigrowth critique is currently less politically powerful in the United States than in the EU, particularly in the face of an economic downturn. However, American transport planners and infrastructure designers can learn from the EU’s need to balance competing goals. It will be difficult, even for American planners, to justify new infrastructure projects on environmental grounds, as new projects (as Banister et al. predicted with new European rail networks) may induce greater transport demand; recall that Hickman and Banister (2007) forecast transport demand as overwhelming any emissions savings from technological innovation in the United Kingdom. In creating new infrastructure projects with potential environmental harms in mind, planning for modal shift may not be enough to meet desired goals, especially if the goals are reduction in greenhouse gases. Both American and European transport planners will have to expand their arsenal of potential strategies if they are to continue to supply adequate transport infrastructure while working to minimize short- and long-term environmental damage.

JESSICA L. H. DOYLE is a doctoral student in City and Regional Planning at the Georgia Institute of Technology and will be awarded a master’s degree in City and Regional Planning in August 2009.  She works as a research assistant at the Center for Quality Growth and Regional Development, focusing on the relationship between infrastructure investment and regional economic growth. Before entering graduate school Ms. Doyle worked as an editor for Economist. com, the online edition of The Economist magazine.  She lives in Atlanta, Georgia.

Notes

1. Hereafter this paper will refer to the ten countries that have joined since May 2004 (Bulgaria, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Malta, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia) as the EU-12. The EU members who joined prior to 2004 will be referred to as the EU-15.
2. The relationship between increasing economic prosperity and increased car buying can be illustrated by the significant decline in car sales in multiple European countries, including the EU-12, in early 2009. The European Automobile Manufacturers’ Association reported that in February 2009, 18.3 percent fewer new cars were registered in Europe compared to February 2008. The drop was 30.3 percent in the EU-12 (excluding Cyprus and Malta), including a 76.2 percent decline in Latvia, a 66.5 percent decline in Romania, and a 21.8 percent decline in Slovenia, generally considered one of the most stable and prosperous of the new member states (ACEA, 2009).
3. Officially the Marco Polo program can be divided into Marco Polo I, which ran between 2003 and 2006, and MARCO POLO II, which received formal funding from the EU’s 2007–13 budget. There is no substantive difference between the two in terms of aims, and so I will refer to both as Marco Polo.
4. Vereniging Landelijk Overleg Betuwelijn, or Association for National Deliberation of the Betuwe Line (van der Heijden, 2006).
5. Stichting Natuur en Milieu, or Foundation for Nature and the Environment (van der Heijden, 2006).
6. The original four “cohesion” countries, when the Cohesion Funds assistance program began in 1993, were Greece, Ireland, Spain, and Portugal. Countries are ruled ineligible for such EU assistance after their annual GDP per capita increases to 100 percent of the EU average. Ireland became ineligible for cohesion funds in 2004; Spain is currently being phased out. All of the EU-12 became eligible for cohesion funds upon joining the EU.

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