Transport Issues and Problems in Southeastern Europe

Caralampo Focas

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138357792
• eBook ISBN: 9781351144148
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Physical Sciences
• Subtopic: Geography
• Index: Geography

The collapse of previous command economic structures in Eastern Europe has led to an often chaotic reorganization of transport operations. Southeastern Europe in particular not only lags behind the western EU countries in terms of transport infrastructure, but also in terms of management and policy. However, despite this, or perhaps even because there are no long-standing established patterns, this region is a fertile territory for innovation. Based on the first major international conference dealing with transport issues in Southeastern Europe, this edited volume brings together key researchers and policy makers to discuss and critically analyse these innovations. Focusing on issues related to privatization and harmonization of national legislation, the contributors also address the countries' struggle with inadequate management structures and the challenges posed in running shipping, ports and railways in a region fragmented into numerous nations and states. It not only provides an up-to-date overview of transport operations and planning in Southeastern Europe, but also provides more general insights into recent and current developments in a region that has undergone widespread upheavals in the past two decades, and is now experiencing renewed growth.

Chapter 1
What is Missing in Southeastern Europe?

Caralampo Focas

Transport in Southeastern Europe is undergoing a period of transition which in the last 15 years has seen a fall in demand (especially for rail and inland shipping), an increasingly ageing infrastructure and the quality of service of transport provision lagging far behind that of Western Europe. This could not but be so, since there have been recent great political upheavals and wars in the Balkans and major changes of economic structures in the previous command economy states.

This book is based on papers given and discussion that followed in the first international conference 'Cost Effective Infrastructure and Systems to Improve Cargo and Passenger Transport in Southeastern Europe' held in Budapest in October 2001 by the Southeastern Transport Research Forum (SETREF).¹

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to provide an overview of recent trends, current salient issues and the major problems in transportation in this part of the world. It aims to do this through a critical interpretation of the papers and discussions that took place at the Budapest conference. Finally, this paper will also present the viewpoint of the author on what is missing in the transport field in Southeastern Europe.

An Overview of Transportation in Southeastern Europe

Transportation in Southeastern Europe is characterised by an ageing and often inadequate transport infrastructure and antiquated and out-of-date management systems of transport operations. Furthermore, transportation activities take place in an environment of political and economic instability.

From the 1980s we have seen a dramatic fall in economic production in most of the countries in Southeastern Europe. The exceptions to this have been Greece and Turkey, the latter having followed a quite different, but nonetheless bumpy, path. This great economic plunge has in most cases been related to the collapse of the socialist command economies of the Eastern European countries. In the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Albania and Moldavia the economic collapse has been compounded by ethnic wars and civil strife. For instance, while in 1989 the gross national product (GNP) per capita in Yugoslavia was over US$3,000, by 1993 it had fallen to under US$1,500. Since then it has hovered around that figure and has not grown again (Depolo, 2001). In many countries of the region there is still a lack of security to guarantee smooth and safe transport movements.

The railways have been the mode of transport most badly affected by these events. In the late 1980s and 1990s there has been a savage decline in rail traffic in most of Southeastern Europe.² For instance, in Hungary the share of freight transport by railways has fallen from 70 per cent to 30 per cent between 1989 and 2000.³ In countries of former Yugoslavia, rail transport now carries a near insignificant amount of traffic. In the Czech Republic the railways carried 25 billion tonne-kilometres of freight in 1993. By 1999, this figure had fallen to 17 billion tonne-kilometres.⁴

Yet car ownership and road traffic in the countries of this region have produced a very different picture with significant growth rates. For instance, in the Czech Republic in 1993 there were 148,000 lorries registered in the republic and this more than doubled by 1999 to over 323,000. Car ownership also grew over this period by over 30 per cent.

The wars in the former Yugoslavia have had the effect of damaging the transport infrastructure, greatly depressing transport demand due to economic retrenchment, and a massive decline in through traffic due to inadequate security en route (Vukanovic et al., 2001). Paradoxically, the collapse of through traffic yet has had the effect of increasing traffic in some neighbouring countries.⁵ For instance, although the Bulgarian economy has suffered greatly in the past decade, the country has seen increasing through traffic, from Greece and Turkey to Northern and Western Europe (Boyan, 2001). For the same reason of bypassing Yugoslavia, there has also been an increasing amount of short-sea-shipping, especially in ro-ro (roll on, roll off) traffic on the Ionian and Adriatic seas between Turkey and Greece to Italy and Croatia.

Transport infrastructure in Southeastern Europe is often of poor quality, ill maintained and differs in specification from country to country. The level of service on Southeastern Europe's road and rail systems is variable but most often poor.

Although on paper there are the grandiose pan-European Transport corridors, in practice in Southeastern Europe, at present these often do not mean much more than lines on a map. On the roads, there are numerous problems in terms of bottlenecks, such as small bridges (or nonexistent bridges⁶), poor maintenance and slow vehicles, such as horse drawn carts.⁷

There very few common standards on infrastructure, roads and most importantly, rail operations throughout Southeastern Europe. On the rail side, the problem of differing systems has the effect of making interstate travel problematic, cumbersome and prone to great delay at border crossings. For instance, on trans-European rail corridor IX there are differing gauges, electrification systems, permitted weights and signalling systems, not to mention different standards of operations⁸ and therefore no through services.

Transport Infrastructure in Southeastern Europe and the Perceived 'Missing Transport Links'

There is a widespread feeling in the countries of Southeastern European, and a majority of the participants at the SETREF conference, that they are lacking in infrastructure, especially roads and motorways. These are usually labelled as the 'missing transport links' or 'transport gaps'.

A graphic example of this was the announcement that it took 27 hours for some conference attendees to come from Sofia in Bulgaria to Budapest by rail. This was stressed to demonstrate that there is indeed a shortcoming in the transport infrastructure of the Balkans. At the conference, nearly all demands for funding (from the European Union) of transport schemes affected primarily the construction of new roads and, to a smaller extent, the funding of the modernisation of the railways and ports. There were very few demands for schemes to improve the quality of transport, such as traffic management, with few exceptions such as the demand for the establishment of cross-border transportation centres (Kokoritsos, 2001).

The widely used definition of the 'missing transport links' is problematic. There seem to be three different methods of defining the 'missing transport links' by those who use this term in Southeastern Europe.

• The first method is based on subtracting the kilometres of roads, motorways, railways, etc. per capita in the countries of Southeastern Europe from the average of the same measures for Western countries. The 'missing transport links' are not just confined to roads and rail but can be measured in terms of ports, bridges, or tunnels.
• The second method is based on identifying on a map the sections of the pan-European corridors that do not have the infrastructure that is proposed. Often it includes 'bottlenecks' such as missing bridges, but can also include large sections, which for instance are roads not of closed motorway standard.
• The third method of defining the 'missing transport links' is not based on current traffic demand or even on short-term future demand, but rather on what are termed 'geostrategic' considerations. However there is no defined methodology for:
  • - identification of these 'geostrategic' infrastructure projects;
  • - prioritisation of these schemes; and
  • - assessment of such schemes.

Many transport professionals in Southeastern Europe argue that some 'missing transport links' or 'bottlenecks', such as bridges between Bulgaria and Romania, should not be assessed purely in terms of forecasted demand, but also to maintain a 'geostrategic balance' in the Balkans and 'to serve as a stabilising factor in the region' (Boyan, 2001). It was argued that one should see the historic importance of trade routes in defining 'geostrategic' importance. For instance, it was claimed that pan-European corridor IV is vital to linking Greece with the rest of Europe, but there are still no bridges across the Danube, between Bulgaria and Romania. If the bridges between Bulgaria and Romania are not erected, it is argued that this could prove to be a destabilising element in the region (ibid.).

Another example of 'geostrategic' considerations in establishing a 'missing transport link', mentioned at the Budapest conference, is the railway link on pan-European corridor V between Slovenia and Hungary. It was claimed that it 'serves a strategic role' for the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and this has been an important reason for its completion. A purported justification of this claim has been that over 80 per cent of its funding came from Germany (DM120 million).⁹

As these examples show, the definitions of 'missing transport links' are not exclusive and can be a combination of the above.

The great enthusiasm in political and construction circles for the adoption of these corridors and the building of motorways to meet these so called gaps, is often leading to biased and unrealistic forecasts. There are many examples of built infrastructures where the forecasted demand has not materialised. A typical example of this is motorway Ml in Hungary. After the Ml was opened in January 1996, traffic and revenues were below projection, because most Hungarian motorists elected to take slower, parallel non-tolled routes. The failure of the revenue and traffic to materialise led the concession company to be taken over by the Hungarian government in June 1999.¹⁰

Another sorry example is the Yugoslavian motorways. The level of internal demand is not enough to repay the loans it cost to build these motorways, so according to Vukanovic, one of the speakers at the Budapest conference, it is important for Yugoslavia to attract through traffic, solely for the purpose of creating revenues to repay the loans for this infrastructure. Ten years ago Yugoslavia had 10,000 vehicles a month in through traffic. This has fallen to about 1,000 vehicles per month (Vukanovic, 2001).

The Preoccupation with Trans-European Corridors in Southeastern Europe

There has been an over-concentration on and over-preoccupation with infrastructure networks in Southeastern Europe. Much less, if any, attention is paid to efficient operations and product quality.

The over-concentration on infrastructure has been exacerbated by a series of very influential studies and policies concentrating on defining a road and rail network for the whole of Southeastern Europe such as the pan-European corridors, the Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA), and more recently the Transport Infrastructure Regional Study (TIRS). This type of identification of vital 'corridors' and 'networks' as lines on a map, aids the notions of 'missing transport links'.

The initial plan for a multimodal European transport network was, the Trans-European Network for Transport (TEN-T).¹¹ This was the network of key transport infrastructure identified across the 15 European Union states in 1996, which was amended in 2001.¹² The TEN-T guidelines encompassed a list of 14 priority projects endorsed by the European Council in 1994. The only priority project that was to be undertaken in Southeastern Europe was the completion, upgrading and construction of new motorways in Greece. For the TEN-T, the European Union has earmarked about €4 billion, which excludes other funding obtainable through the cohesion funds and special bank loans.

The setting of the trans-European network was followed by the Transport Infrastructure Needs Assessment (TINA). This was an initiative set up in 1996 by the European Commission to identify the scale of the problem for creating an effective European transport network across the majority of the Central and Eastern European Countries of Europe (CEEC). It was composed of the candidate countries for accession to the European Union, with the exception of Turkey and Malta.

A European-wide transport ministers conference held in Crete in 1994 identified nine long-distance transport corridors for development outside the European Union. A later conference at Helsinki established a tenth corridor and also proposed four, somewhat nebulous, pan-European Transport Areas. These trans-European network corridors, now known as either the Crete or the Helsinki corridors, have created a transport network that stretches from the Baltic to the Adriatic and Black seas across Central and Eastern Europe and into the adjoining countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States (former Union of Socialist Soviet Republics). They comprise road, rail and some inland waterways. One corridor, corridor VII, is different in that it is the River Danube, running from the Black Sea along the borders of the Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, across Serbia and Hungary into Slovakia.

Investment in corridor infrastructure may not accord with the priorities for infrastructure investment identified by national governments elsewhere on their respective transport networks. The need for these new roads and railways is certainly not proven. They may not accord with national priorities and indeed may cater more for through traffic. Furthermore, most often there are no state fonds to build major new transport infrastructure and private sector involvement in building infrastructure is problematic, because of political uncertainty, low traffic projections and inadequate government guarantees.¹³

There is no legal basis lor the pan-buropean corridors (not all Memoranda defining the actual routing of corridors are formally established); even less so for the TINA networks. Yet they have established some sort of mythical status in Southeastern Europe. An often-heard pronouncement for new road construction in these countries, is to 'complete ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• List of Contributors
• Foreword
• 1 What is Missing in Southeastern Europe?
• PART I EUROPEAN POLICY AND TRANSPORT CORRIDORS
• PART II THE 'MISSING TRANSPORT LINKS' IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
• PART III IMPROVING MANAGEMENT AND QUALITY IN TRANSPORT IN SOUTHEASTERN EUROPE
• Index