Short Overview Of European Roads And Their Financing

It can be stated that serious amounts of money have been invested in the European countries roads infrastructure, but it is necessary to make a realistic difference between the source of investments: Western European countries preferred to spend a consistent part of their national resources, while Southern and Central European countries focused on implementing projects which were co-financed by the Instrument for Structural Policies for Pre-Accesion, European Regional Development Fund or the Cohesion Fund. Even then, there was still a lack of necessary funding and the Member States appealed to bank loans. In this context, Trans European Transport Network projects became from optimistic mapping objectives to time-delayed schedules in terms of payments, constructions and materialisation of cross-border cooperation. It is noteworthy to say that the general situation of roads infrastructure affects the general economy as a whole, because of the inputs and outputs generated through day by day traffic: better roads, less maintenance expenditures; worse roads, more car accidents. The article focuses on the 2000-2006 and 2007-2013 programming periods, among the Member States, in order to seek sources of financing and evidences of these investments, in numbers. The paradox of using European funds, together with national resources and bank loans is generated by the fact that these investments need to be paid back over the economic lifetime of the project: or, the impact of such investments materialise in the form of user charges. With an approximately total amount of EUR 65 billion invested only by the European Union in road projects in all Member States, an obvious question arises: is it worth implementing a road project following EU’s financing bureaucracy or is it easier to put the action at national level? The answer is driven by statistics. The same mentality could stand for rail, seaport, airport and other types of transport infrastructure.