Effects of EU Enlargement on Transport in Austria

For the five Central Eastern European countries Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary and Slovenia (CEEC 5), European Union membership will foster economic development and trade with Western Europe. Greater division of labour and growing demand for goods, services and international travel, driven by rising income levels, are pushing up the growth of cross-border transport of people and goods. Passenger traffic is further multiplied by commuter traffic in the wake of the free movement of labour. The Austrian transport network will be burdened not just by bilateral traffic but also by transit traffic between the CEEC 5 and Western Europe. With car ownership in the CEEC 5 still at a relatively low level, it is expected that the growth of passenger traffic will primarily affect road transport. If the road transport of goods were completely liberalised, as foreseen in the acquis communautaire, this would lead to unchecked growth of heavy-goods traffic to and from the CEEC 5. If we assume that the CEEC 5 will join the EU in 2004, that road use will not be subject to serious price increases and that the infrastructure capacities will be adapted to the growth of traffic on an ongoing basis, source-destination heavy-goods transport would quadruple by 2015, and transit traffic would grow fivefold in comparison to 1994. Source-destination rail transport, on the other hand, would grow by just 20 percent and rail transit traffic is expected to double up to 2015. In spite of considerable modal split shifts to the road, the share of cross-border road transport of goods with the CEEC 5 would take until 2015 to attain the level already current in cross-border goods traffic within the EU.