Railway alliance presents Retro Award for 2010

Berlin. The Pro-Rail Alliance has chosen the liberal-conservative coalition's decision to stipulate ring-fenced funding for the roads from 2011 as 'the most stupid transport-policy decision of 2010'. "The prize for the most retrogressive decision by the federal government can be quite clearly awarded for the principle that the 'roads should fund the roads'. It is a return to the 1960s," said Dirk Flege, managing director of the Pro-Rail Alliance in Berlin on Thursday. He criticised the fact that by appropriating 100% of the income from HGV motorway charges to funding the highways from 2011, the government was cancelling a compromise that had been painstakingly negotiated. "What we are seeing today is the very opposite of integrated transport policy," said Flege. "For this return to antediluvian, compartmentalised thinking, the federal government really has earned the Retro Award for 2010," said the alliance's managing director.

The federal budget passed by parliament on 26 November 2010 stipulates that income from the HGV charges should no longer be divided up proportionately for funding the highways (50 percent), the railways (38 percent) and the inland waterways (12 percent). From the beginning of 2011, the total income will automatically go towards funding highway construction, regardless of whether it makes transport policy sense.

The Pro-Rail Alliance managing director pointed out that the preamble to the act of parliament that introduced motorway charges on HGVs from 1.1.2005 explicitly mentions shifting transport onto the railways and inland waterways. "This modal shift objective has been thwarted by the government's current decision," said Flege. The federal budget is also "a clear breach of promise by the liberal-conservative coalition". A few months before the federal election, the federal parliamentary spokespeople on transport issues for both the conservative CDU and the liberal FDP said on camera during a Pro-Rail Alliance event that there would be no changes to the way the income from HGV tolls is divided up after the election.

The railway lobby said that although federal transport minister Ramsauer had guaranteed that funding for inland waterways and railway construction in 2011 would come from other parts of the budget, "the liberal-conservative coup meant that the road lobby was home and dry. Any future pressure to reduce the federal budget would be at the expense of environmentally friendly rail freight and inland waterway shipping, whereas the ongoing expansion of the federal highway network is safeguarded by the income from HGV charges," said Flege. In times of tight budgets, ring-fenced cash flows are a license to print money. "Asphalt will engender ever more asphalt, while the plug has been pulled on environmentally friendly forms of transport."