Roundup: Private investment crucial for EU transport growth: EU officials

Scaling up private investment in innovative and new infrastructure is crucial to meet the European Union (EU)'s multibillion transportation development goals and increased travel needs, EU officials said Monday.

Under the Connecting Europe Facility (CEF), 24.05 billion euros (about 27 billion U.S. dollars) is made available from the EU's 2014-2020 budget to co-fund Trans-European Transport Network for Transport projects (TEN-T) in the EU member states.

"This is not enough. We estimate that only the needs of the TEN-T alone are 700 billion euros. There is no way member states can support such amounts," EU Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc told delegates on the first day of the high-level EU transport conference.

"We are really putting efforts in engaging private investment to come on board through a pipeline of efficient and profitable projects," she told ministers from 22 EU member states and over 2,800 transport experts and CEOs gathering in Rotterdam for this yearly meeting on TEN-T and CEF.

The biggest chunk of the CEF transport funds go towards building large-scale infrastructure projects in the so-called core network corridors, the nine regional networks around Europe that the Commission wants to build using a mixture of different transport modes.

These corridors aim at interconnecting Europe, stretching from Lisbon in the west to the Romanian city of Constantia in the east, Glasgow and Helsinki in the north down to Valletta and Cyprus in the Mediterranean.

Only for the Scandinavian-Mediterranean north-south axis, the 600 projects to be implemented would need seven times the total CEF budget, according to Pat Cox, the Coordinator for this particular Corridor.

And funds are lacking particularly for parts of those networks in several member states that receive cohesion funds despite mounting efforts to stimulate investments in combination with the Juncker Fund (the European Fund for Strategic Investments, or EFSI) and the European Investment Bank (EIB).

"We need a strategic plan to support member states and public promoters to transition from a publicly financed approach to the use of new financial instruments and private funding. This shift needs to create a new investment culture in the EU," said Werner Hoyer, President of EIB, the bloc's long-term lender and core partner in implementing the Juncker plan which aims at mobilizing 315 billion euros to finance large infrastructure and support SME businesses over three years.

"We are working to develop a stable pipeline of projects that would enable necessary and vital investments with a substantial economic returns and significant impact on jobs and companies," said the EIB president.

He noted that differences across member states can accentuate the lack of investment. "A lack of harmonised standards on European level hinder project implementation and uncertainly on tariff regimes are a significant deterrent for investors."

Dutch minister for Infrastructure and the Environment Melanie Schultz van Haegen called on the transport industry's stakeholders to pursue investment not only on large scale infrastructure, but also on solutions for smart and sustainable mobility, such as autonomous driving and river information systems.

Europe needs to take a lead on how to use data to secure more sustainable and secure ways of transportation, the Dutch minister said. (1 euro = 1.13 U.S. dollars) Enditem