Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-12-17-Speech-3-184"
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"en.20031217.6.3-184"2
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"After eight years of heated debate, a solution to the ecopoints issue is, at last, on the horizon. Indeed, the conciliation conclusions must be welcomed as restoring the balance in a situation whereby an instrument is being applied in Austria that holds back HGVs, which can travel freely everywhere else, including in the Alpine regions of France and Italy, without being subject to environmental tolls. I repeat: including in the Alpine regions, and here, I am addressing the Austrian Member who talked as if the Alps were an exclusively Austrian concern.
Yet our problems are the same as those of which Austria complains and the environmental damage is the same. We are all in favour of protecting our mountains and countries from an excessive amount of HGV traffic, but it is not by moving the cause of pollution elsewhere that the problem can be solved. Nor is it any consolation that the environmental damage is paid for by extremely high tolls, the effect of which is to bring transport companies, especially the smallest and weakest, to their knees. Indeed, the amount of damage does not change, irrespective of the tolls. I agree with Mr Lisi: this solution is the best possible compromise and it ought to satisfy Austria too. It may be, however, that Austria had become too used to the situation, or, perhaps, not used to it enough, depending on which way you look at it.
What, then, should we do at this juncture? We need to start work resolutely on the trans-European networks, first and foremost the Brenner base tunnel and the high-speed four-track update of the Munich-Verona rail corridor, in order to provide a genuine rail alternative to road transport. However, we need to make things very clear to the companies managing intermodality. It is true that intermodality is currently being implemented in a fairly satisfactory way, but its prices, timetables and services need to be genuinely competitive and attractive – or rather, convincing – so as to draw all the traffic from the roads onto the railways."@en1
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