It’s that time of year again, when Europeans pack up the kids and pets and embark on an annual vacation exodus — jamming highways that are no celebration of European unity.
The highway headaches are rooted largely in European governments’ inability to craft a sensibly numbered, well-maintained and uniformly sign-posted highway grid.
”There has been a chronic under-investment in European roadways,” says Brendan Halleman, a spokesperson for the European Union Road Federation, a Brussels lobby group.
He says public investment in transport infrastructure in the EU fell from 1,5% of gross domestic product in the 1980s to less than 1% in 2004.
That’s a funding drop of â,¬95-billion over 25 years, an amount that pales compared with the â,¬346-billion EU governments pocketed in tax revenues from road users in 2004 alone.
That year, Cyprus, Malta and eight East European nations joined the EU, compounding the problem of bad highways: the 10 nations require 14 000km of new or upgraded highways — the equivalent of Germany’s autobahn network.
The EU road federation says governments have paid scant attention to improving Europe’s highways, even as car ownership has doubled and fuel costs have skyrocketed in the last 25 years.
Halleman says European road users — from private car owners to trucking companies — have no idea how governments use the taxes they pay on vehicles, fuel and roadway tolls. ”They don’t see it going to road repairs because under-investment in infrastructure is cause of traffic jams.”
And those jams are bound to get worse.
Traffic in England, for instance, is expected to rise by as much as 10% by 2010, said a recent study of Britain’s Institute for Public Policy Research. Seven out of 10 Britons think roadway congestion has worsened since 2003.
Fifty years of European economic integration have left no mark on Europe’s packed highways.
A decade ago, the EU drafted plans to upgrade trans-European highways at a cost of hundreds of billions of euros — notably major north-south and east-west corridors — but governments have brushed those aside. Across the EU, road signs and signals have not been made uniform.
And Europeans should take no comfort from roadmaps showing ”E-highways” sprawling like crab grass across the continent — all the way to China, in fact. Once behind the wheel, drivers soon find out the purported network is as bewildering as alphabet soup.
The vast majority of the 55 European nations that agreed in 1975 to create a uniform highway grid have assigned ”E” numbers to major roads. But only four — Norway, Belgium, Sweden and Denmark — now have E-highways as was meant: uncluttered with rival national numbers.
For instance, the main road from Milan in the northern Italy to Tarranto in the south is 845km long and masquerades as the A1, the E35, the E45, the A14, the E55 and the E843. In the Netherlands, the A15, the A16 and the E19 can be the same road. Germany’s Autobahns list a green ”E” number — sometimes.
”It has always been up to European governments to display European highways,” says Christopher Smith, a road-safety expert at the Geneva-based United Nations Economic Commission for Europe, which brokered the 1975 E-highway network deal.
”E-highways don’t work if governments are unwilling to organise this in a logical manner,” says Henk Kramer, a lobbyist at the EU for TNL, the Dutch road transport sector.
Grillo Pasquarelli, a senior EU transport official, rules out the EU legislating a uniform highway network across Europe at a time when public opinion is wary of EU meddling in Europeans’ lives. ”That’s a pity because the current system need not be this complicated.”
Benedicte-Marie Chevet, a spokesperson for Michelin road maps in Paris, says her group will continue to list E-numbers as a service to motorists.
She has never heard one complaint. But has she ever seen a European highway system other than on her own maps? ”Actually, no!” she says. ”I never notice it.” — Sapa-AP