The European association Ferrmed has asked the European Union to concentrate investments in freight transport where there is more rail traffic —about 18,000 kilometers— to add efficiency in the fight against climate change and figures in an additional 100,000 million euros to achieve it .
For the organization's president, Joan Amorós, there is no "coherent plan at European level", which explains "the blockade" of the last 20 years in which hardly any progress has been made in the full implementation of the Mediterranean Corridor. “With what we propose, we can obtain real environmental results, we could eliminate around 65-70 million tons of CO2 per year just by investing in these 18,000 kilometers” of railway network, he assured during a meeting in Brussels, in which the Latest report of the association Traffic and Modal Shift Optimization in the EU.
The report estimates that road freight traffic accounts for 30% of EU greenhouse gas emissions, while trains consume 7.8 times less energy than lorries. “We are in an emergency situation, if we do not take measures we will not get ahead. Transport is a very important element of pollution, but with this pressure from the environment we can make a coherent investment plan”, Amorós insisted.
In this sense, the report asks that the institutions of the European Union have a plan "with specific priorities". Amorós has lamented that until now the Mediterranean Corridor, considered a priority in the European Union, is "a minimum project", in which the European Commission "does not have the strength" to convince the Member States. "As long as each Member State acts on its own, there is no solution, because it is invested in a disjointed way and there is no interconnection", he has criticized.
The study highlights that among these 18,000 kilometers is the Barcelona-Tarragona axis —the third most important in the European Union due to traffic density, only behind the Ruhr basin and the area around Milan—. The European Commission has calculated that some 300,000 million euros must be invested between now and 2030, of which 100,000 million should be added to make freight lines more efficient. Specifically, this additional investment could serve to unfold lines such as Tarragona and Valencia, in the case of the Mediterranean Corridor.
According to estimates by the European Commission, by 2030, 30% of freight transport will be by river or rail. However, Ferrmed denounces that freight traffic by train has been stagnant "for years" at 18%, while road traffic is more than 75% and river traffic is 6% (according to 2018 estimates). "To reach this 30%, we have to add 408 new terminals," argued Amorós, in which he considers that to cover long distances it would be a good complement to road transport and thus emit less polluting gases.
