Lifting Austrian traffic bans: a good starting point to balance economic growth with sustainable development!

Brussels – European transport ministers will meet next week in Slovenia, to discuss how to meet the key objective of the Lisbon Strategy for economic growth whilst adequately managing the subsequent increase in trade flows and their social and environmental impacts.

The IRU welcomes the EU Slovenian Presidency’s decision to tackle head on the achievement of European economic development alongside sustainable transport. The Austrian A12 motorway ban against heavy goods traffic highlights the urgent need to strike the appropriate balance to decouple economic growth from its environmental impact. 

IRU President, Janusz Lacny, said: “For every economist, for every decision maker, road transport, due to its door to door services and to the fact that 86% of all transport occurs under 150km, does not only drive economic development, but will remain, above all, the lifeblood of all human activities in all countries, including on the EU territory. Therefore, just as any restriction or blockage in blood circulation will have a dramatic effect on our human life, any restriction or blockage on road transport will have an even greater dramatic effect on the health of an economy and society as a whole!”

This traffic ban which will come into force in Austria on 1 May, albeit environmentally motivated, will directly result in a 3-hour traffic diversion that will affect some 300,000 vehicles each year, producing an extra 22 million litres of diesel fuel consumption and an extra 60 million kilos of CO2 emissions! Moreover, the additional economic damage caused by this unilateral restriction of the free movement of goods within the EU’s internal market - designed to enhance the EU’s economic development - is in no way consistent with the EU’s Lisbon Agenda objectives.

The President of the IRU EU Liaison Committee, Bertil Dahlin, said: “Yet again, an EU Member State has implemented a well-intentioned but seriously flawed environmental policy, which damages not only the economy but above all the environment. This unilateral decision, which responds to local requests, has not solved the problem at all, but has instead dramatically increased and moved the problem elsewhere. ”

Without properly considered transport policies that identify the most efficient means of removing environmental damages with the least overall damage to the economy - such as the IRU 3 “i” strategy for achieving sustainable development based on innovation, incentives and infrastructure - both the EU’s Lisbon Strategy and its green agenda will fail.

This is why, in the context of the ongoing debate on the internalisation of transport external costs, the IRU demands that EU policy is designed with the proper tools, i.e. rigorous regulatory impact assessments and imbedded cost-benefit analysis principles, and advocates applying the Cheapest Cost Avoider Principle as the most cost-efficient way to elaborate a fair and sustainable transport policy at EU level.

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