Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-04-22-Speech-3-480"
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Mr President, first of all I should like to thank Mr Savary for his work. I should like to thank him for the commitment he has shown to promoting a European policy on transport in major cities, in cities. This is not a secondary issue: if we do indeed want to rise to the challenge of transport in Europe, we have to work in the field of urban transport.
Your report will certainly make an important contribution to our internal discussions and I can assure you that we will be able to consider many of the proposals it contains. Of course, there are aspects and details that require further clarification or debate. We will examine your suggestions very carefully, I can assure you, together with the recommendation from the Committee of the Regions, with whom you consulted.
Today’s vote will not be the end of our dialogue on this. As the Commission’s work proceeds, I will make sure I stay in contact with Mr Savary and the other Members who have followed the transport sector closely, so that the plan the Commission adopts will be in keeping with what Parliament is adopting and will represent genuine quality. Finally – let me say again – our plan will not show that the Commission is replacing local bodies, but simply that the Commission wants to help local bodies to improve their work by sharing information and best practices that will enable citizens to live better and move around more easily within cities, outside cities and while crossing cities. I therefore thank the European Parliament for the work it has done and the vote it is to hold on this plan.
That is why I should like firstly to thank Mr Savary. I repeat: thanks to him, we have made progress in the field of urban transport, and today’s report, which will be voted on tomorrow, is a very important message; it is a message that I must listen to, and I hope to be able to give Mr Savary positive feedback on his commitment during the next term of office. I am grateful to him once again for the work he has done on the issue of urban transport.
I shall now continue in my mother tongue.
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, urban transport clearly forms an integral part of the European Union transport system since the whole system often begins and ends in large urban areas, and crosses plenty of them along the way. For this reason, it is important not only to consider urban mobility from the point of view of city life, but also from the perspective of transport of all kinds, including long-distance transport.
Combating climate change, facilitating trade, guaranteeing energy supplies, responding to citizen’s mobility needs, reducing problems associated with congestion and tackling demographic change are all issues of fundamental importance for European policy, and mobility in urban areas is intimately linked to all of these challenges.
It was for precisely this reason that the Commission presented its Green Paper on Urban Mobility in September 2007, and the consultation that followed the adoption of the Green Paper has demonstrated that there is broad agreement on the fact that the European Union has a role to play in this area. Your resolution on the Green Paper on Urban Mobility, drafted under Mr Rack’s leadership and adopted on 9 July 2008, upholds this conclusion.
The aim of the Paper was to pave the way for an action plan on urban mobility; Parliament’s decision to go ahead with its own action plan before any Commission proposal was made sends a strong political signal; that is why I emphasised the significance of Mr Savary’s work as rapporteur, as it shows how much importance Parliament attaches to a job we absolutely cannot afford to neglect.
As you are well aware, I am committed to the issue of urban mobility and to the swift adoption of a well-drafted action plan. I would like to reiterate that this is planned for in the Commission’s programme of work for 2009 and I hope that it will be adopted as soon as possible. Mr Savary put it very well in his speech; there is some resistance within the European institutions as some people feel that an action plan of this kind would violate the principle of subsidiarity. I do not think there is any question of this, especially if we look at the Latin root of the word subsidiarity, which is
meaning ‘help’: it is our job as European institutions to help local institutions work more successfully. Helping someone does not mean replacing them, it means contributing towards a better solution to problems!
Without going into detail on the proposal, I can confirm that our action plan will be based on activities that we have been driving for some time, and will integrate them into a coherent context, seeking to present that political vision that is still lacking in European action on urban mobility. In this way, the political framework should be outlined for other future intervention in fields in which action at Community level is deemed useful, or indeed essential."@en1
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