Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-09-24-Speech-2-255"
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"en.20020924.11.2-255"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, firstly my many thanks go to Mr Bradbourn for his sterling work and his report. The purpose of the Marco Polo programme is to reduce the social costs of traffic and, obviously, this basic idea and aim are very much worthy of support. But as the old saying goes, ‘All that glitters is not gold’. Unfortunately, I see Marco Polo as being part of the Commission’s programme to forcibly shift traffic from the roads to the railways. For this reason I cannot agree with what it says in the White Paper, that shares between the various transport modes should be retained and frozen at their present level until 2010. This cannot be a natural development, because we are barking up the wrong tree.
It is true that road transport is responsible for a lot of congestion and pollution, but that is due to the fact that there simply is no other means of transport that compares to it. Freight transport is forced onto the roads because it is the most effective option. It is the fastest, the most flexible, and, most important of all, the cheapest form of transport for the end user. The citizens of Europe pay for transport and if it does not run efficiently and cheaply in Europe, we all suffer the consequences. In fact, believe me, those who always suffer most are those who have no alternative – those whose means are the smallest of all.
We should establish good incentives for different modes of transport and consider their overall costs, their benefits and their disadvantages to society as a whole. If we start off that way, it is all the same whether the share of road traffic is 1% or 100%. We need sufficient investment in the whole transport infrastructure, but the EU cannot be primarily responsible for finance, as we do not happen to be a money-dispensing machine.
Although this idea of the Commission unfortunately has a somewhat faulty basis there is also much that is positive about Marco Polo. The interoperatability of different transport modes, where we get something that works very well from the whole, is important. We must constantly remember that we are using the taxpayer’s money, and we have to use it as efficiently as possible, and certainly not in any populist way. I would like to repeat that there should not be an aim here to reduce road transport but rather reduce its adverse effects, because if a patient is sick you will certainly not cure him by killing him off, but by giving him the proper medicine."@en1
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