Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-03-10-Speech-2-394"
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"en.20090310.34.2-394"2
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"Mr President, the abolition of customs borders and exchange rates within Europe has increased the scale of the economy. The government has created a dense network of ever wider motorways. Many goods are now transported over long distances, sometimes even at various stages of the production process.
These developments have a negative impact on the environment, and their costs are not borne by hauliers. Partly as a result of this, freight transport has become increasingly cheap over the years. This encourages even more transport and increases the environmental impact still further.
In nearly 10 years as a Member of this House, I have often heard talk of charging this environmental damage to hauliers, but unfortunately the results are still unsatisfactory. Sometimes it seems as though politicians are more interested in the calculation models themselves than the results that can be obtained using them. Decisions taken on this in 2006 have yielded insufficient results.
As far as my group is concerned, the objective must be to give the most environmentally-friendly modes of transport – transport by rail and water – more of a chance, and to curb the most environmentally damaging – road and air transport. In the absence of a clear objective such as this, calculation models and more European rules only produce bureaucracy, at no benefit to humans and the environment.
My country, the Netherlands, is an example of how not to do things. A discussion on road pricing – taxing road traffic according to the distance travelled – has been under way there for nearly 20 years, and has now become completely deadlocked. The only impression voters are left with is that congestion is being taxed without there being any prospect of a solution to the problems in the form of improvements to the railways and public passenger transport services.
Europe must not repeat such errors by Member States. It must, however, remove all the barriers to regional and national measures, enable effective coordination of these measures, improve cross-border payment of charges and provide professional drivers with better information on what measures to expect outside the area where they live.
The proposals by rapporteur Mr El Khadraoui provide scope for this, and therefore have the support of my group. In addition, rapporteur Mr Jarzembowski mainly calls attention to the noise nuisance from rail freight traffic, and we agree with him. At the same time, however, I should like to point out that the construction of more and more high noise barriers along railway lines cannot be the solution."@en1
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