Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-07-01-Speech-1-044"
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"en.20020701.4.1-044"2
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"Mr President, Madam Vice-President, I wanted to reply to my Bavarian colleague, but he has left the chamber. So I shall say it for the record.
It is ludicrous that somebody always cries out to the Commission for help when the Austrians close the Alps. Yet when we do something really sensible, like imposing standard rules for traffic restrictions, he questions whether the Community is competent to do so. I would take this opportunity to remind him that you cannot take a stand on more than one platform at once. The whole thing is quite logical. We are discussing traffic across borders, the trans-European networks, and our desire, expressed in the White Paper, for an efficient system for utilising them, and along comes an MEP and says that Europe has no competence in this area. I can only say that such a thing is laughable, absolutely laughable.
Even though I am from Germany, a country battered by transit traffic, with lorries crossing it from north to south and west to east, I nonetheless take the view that we need European regulation. We must have rules to sort out the conflict of objectives between the interests of the local citizens – who are opposed to noise and to clogged roads – and the interest of the economy in getting traffic through.
We complain about high unemployment, but if we want to deal with unemployment, we need economic growth. You cannot get economic growth off the Internet. You can order goods that way, but, as you have to have them delivered, jobs in industry depend on the efficient utilisation of the trans-European network. The assertion that this has nothing to do with Europe, and that every country can do as it likes, is positively absurd, and our being on the threshold of EU enlargement makes it all the more so. We should be giving the countries that are about to join us a sheaf of unambiguous and harmonised regulations that they know they can stick to and be guided by. There is a general need for European regulation.
We simply have to declare that nobody, not even the Commission, wants to use the system of efficient reporting and monitoring of supplementary restrictions to change the Member States' public holidays. That is just nonsense. This is primarily about weekend journeys. That is the issue. Any haulier or employer has to know when and where they can pass through and when and where they have to stop. Then, of course, there have to be proper parking places with sanitary facilities.
So, Commissioner, Madam Vice-President, there is just one question to which I would like you to give me an answer. Mr Savary, who was a very good rapporteur, has proposed this European apparatus for road traffic information. Are you prepared to support it? If you are, then I would tell Mr Ferber that, if we want an efficient information system, we have to lay it down in a directive, in order to require the Member States to play their part. We know that Member States do not supply up-to-date data if systems are voluntary. So that is what we need. Commissioner, Madam Vice-President, are you ready to support Mr Savary's great idea for such a mechanism?"@en1
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