European Union has big ideas for 2050 transpo

Would reshape the continent

Marci Gilbert, Mar 29, 11.

The European Union is not thinking small. On Monday the European Commission, an executive branch of the EU, announced a set of proposals that would dramatically reshape the continent’s transportation patterns by 2050, according to a story in New Urban Network..

Among the goals:

• Use of automobiles powered by gasoline or diesel fuel would be cut in half by 2030 in urban areas, and would be phased out altogether in cities by 2050.

• Thirty percent of the road freight traveling more than 300 kilometers (186 miles) would shift to other modes — basically rail or water — by 2030. By the middle of the century, more than 50 percent of the road traffic traveling that 186 miles or more would shift to the alternative modes, aided by the development of “efficient and green freight corridors.”

• The current high-speed rail network would triple in length by 2030, and “a dense railway network” would operate in all of the EU’s member states. By 2050, a high-speed rail network for Europe would be completed, and the majority of medium-distance passengers would travel by rail.

• Except for long hauls (of which there would be many), there would be far fewer passengers traveling in Europe by air. And the use of “low-carbon sustainable fuels in aviation” would rise to 40 percent by 2050. By that time, the plan also envisions that all “core network airports” would be connected to the rail network — preferably to high-speed rail.

The aim, according to the European Commission, is to achieve “essentially CO2-free movement of goods in major urban centers by 2030.” EU Transport Commissioner Siim Kallas defended the proposal — the Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area — as essential to cutting European’s production of greenhouse gases.

“Oil will become scarcer in future decades, sourced increasingly from uncertain supplies,” the EU white paper argues. The less successful the world is in moving away from carbon-based fuels, “the greater will be the oil price increase,” the report says, noting, “In 2010, the oil import bill was around 210 billion euros [$296 billion] for the EU.”

Source: New Urban Network
Photo source: Daily Mail