It doesn’t matter if it’s railways, highways or waterways — when it comes to delivering mega-projects Europe is falling short.
Many of the bloc’s infrastructure initiatives are far behind schedule and way over budget, putting at risk plans to criss-cross Europe with shiny new high-speed railways and freight-bearing waterways by 2030, according to a European Court of Auditors report out Tuesday.
The report looked at eight big projects in 13 countries worth €54 billion of which €7.5 billion comes from Brussels. Six of the projects reviewed — which include everything from high-speed rail lines in the Baltics and Spain to new Romanian highways — are at serious risk of not being completed by 2030, the target for connecting national networks into European transport corridors, the auditors said.
“The Commission must play a stronger role otherwise we would have much more ineffective spending,” said Oskar Herics, the lead auditor.
The average delay across projects is a whopping 11 years, the auditors found. They laid the blame on differing national investment priorities and planning rules that don’t always line up with neighboring countries.
A hands-off approach from the European Commission makes that worse.
“Each of the countries is working in its own national bubble,” said Herics. “The Commission’s oversight … has weaknesses and is distant.”
To make sure money is being spent correctly, and things are on track, the Commission uses a band of former government ministers and MEPs as coordinators to check on projects. But beyond polite nudges, they are largely powerless despite the billions of euros flowing into projects from the EU’s budget.
Here are five projects where the auditors say Brussels dropped the ball:
1. Rail Baltica
A 900-kilometer railway through Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia should tick all the boxes. It’s a climate-friendly alternative to road transport, offering a European standard gauge railway to plug a peripheral region of the EU into its core network.
Yet it’s been dogged by squabbling over routing, funding and project management. The original budget of €4.6 billion is now €7 billion, and there are concerns that the projected number of passengers falls short of the EU’s benchmark.
“An assessment of the passenger traffic part of the Rail Baltica line shows that it is not economically sustainable,” said the report.
The plan was to open the connection by 2026, but EU officials concede that this timeline is now very ambitious. To get the project moving, three separate cost-benefit analyses were drafted, with each including a different traffic forecast, the auditors said.
2. Lyon-Turin TGV link
The cross-border railway connecting France and Italy — dubbed Trasporto Alta Velocità (TAV) — has been a political football in both countries. It includes 270 kilometers of track, but also a 57-kilometer tunnel, and is already 15 years delayed.
The problem is the economic rationale, the auditors say. Less than 3 million tons of rail freight are transported along the existing slow rail line but the forecast is for 24 million tons by 2035, Herics said.
To hit that target, both countries would also have to invest in “resolving bottlenecks and building missing links at corridor level,” the report said.
3. Seine-Scheldt waterway
The project is to upgrade a 1,100-kilometer inland waterway network around the basins of the Seine and Scheldt rivers in France and Belgium for use by larger vessels, and build a 107-kilometer canal connecting the two.
That’s good for low-carbon logistics as shifting more freight to canals takes trucks off roads. But the project is already delayed by 18 years. The Commission last year stepped in with a detailed timeline to advance the project, but auditors warn that it “stopped short of setting a precise milestone for the timely completion of the key missing waterway link to the port of Zeebrugge.”
The project had been justified on the premise that it would lead to a fourfold increase in traffic by 2060 compared with 2030. That will require a significant uptick in freight volumes, but “the statistics from the last decade do not suggest that this will occur,” the auditors warned.
4. Fehmarn Belt
The 19-kilometer submarine road and rail link between Rødby in Denmark and Puttgarden in Germany has faced strong objections from ferry companies operating on the route and from environmentalists. While competition concerns have been largely laid to rest, it remains unclear whether the project will be finished by 2028.
The auditors argue the Commission didn’t properly review Germany’s traffic forecast for its side of the connection, which will be much too low to make the project worth the investment. It also didn’t take into account the costs of noise pollution protection, which further raises the total investment.
5. Brenner Base Tunnel
The plan is to build a 64-kilometer railway tunnel between Austria and Italy to move passenger and freight traffic off the much-frequented Alpine pass by 2028. But although tensions have risen on Austrian efforts to thin truck traffic on the pass, the project looks set for big delays.
The German access lines to the tunnel could take until 2040-2050 to complete. “This would prevent the [project] from fully delivering its benefits for another 20 years,” the auditors warned. The report also noted that cross-border cooperation has been spotty on the project.
Germany, Italy, Austria and the EU “have not yet managed to complete a harmonized traffic study using consistent figures and methods” for the entire stretch between Munich and Verona and the countries have questioned each other’s forecasting methods, auditors said.