Transportation 2020. Opportunities and challenges

Although additional roads and high quality railways are still needed to connect the main cities of Europe and the undeveloped regions, the major obstacles to expansion are scarcity of space and environmental concerns. Existing approaches to solving road traffic problems, such as conventional traffic management systems, civil engineering improvements and improving vehicle standards, are important, but have limited effect in the face of rapidly increasing road use. Road congestion in urban areas and interurban links is a major problem. It is mainly due to the use of home-to-work travel of private cars taking a large amount of road space for only one or two persons. This needs to be reduced and can be achieved by attracting more people onto public transport. To reduce congestion, strategies will be needed to eliminate private car traffic from certain areas. It is imperative to ensure that attractive public transport is available before such measures are applied. The French have already introduced their high-speed TGV train, which sets new standards of passenger comfort, and they plan to increase their high-speed network by almost 5000 km of new lines. There is also a plan to extend this network all across Western Europe. In addition, municipal authorities are developing tram and light rail systems to ease traffic congestion in inner cities.