At a conference in Sofia, transport ministers from 53 countries called on governments to take action against transport congestion that is causing severe delays and pushing up costs.
In a joint statement, they said that air traffic and maritime container traffic were expected to double in the next 20 years, worsening pressure on road and rail traffic. Without effective policy intervention, congestion would be aggravated, they said.
The meeting was attended by members of the European Conference of Ministers of Transport along with their counterparts from Australia, Canada, China, Japan, Korea, Mexico, New Zealand and the US.
The conference said that an effort should be made to improve the control system through traffic control measures, to improve multimodal transport and facilitate trade.
Second, the ministers approved the idea of introducing fees, which had produced good results in cities including London, Stockholm and Singapore.
Third, infrastructure capacity should be improved through adequate investment, which would ensure socio-economic returns, they said.
The conference decided to set up an International Transport Forum. This forum will hold its first session in 2008.
This was a strategic decision and a new commitment, ECMT Secretary General Jack Short told a news conference, according to a report by Bulgarian news agency BTA.
The forum will have a global focus because globalisation and its consequences for world trade and travel lent a new dimension and new dynamism to the flow of traffic. However, these factors also caused new problems and posed new challenges to the transport sector, which needed to seek global solutions to them.
From May 2008, when the forum will be established, all meetings will be held in Leipzig, Germany.
Speaking on May 30 at the opening of the two-day conference, Bulgarian Prime Minister Sergei Stanishev said that if Bulgaria was to become a competitive country with a high quality of life and higher incomes for everyone in society, it needed to achieve several strategic goals in the medium term.
Stanishev said that the top goal was to work in a more organised and efficient manner to make the Bulgarian economy competitive.
Most of the funding in the operational programmes included in the national strategic reference framework was for transport, Stanishev said.
The aim was to successfully integrate Bulgarias transport infrastructure into the European transport corridors and to develop the national transport infrastructure. Stanishev said that the past two years had seen investments and capital spending in the Bulgarian budget nearly double.
The same approach is planned for the next few years because underdeveloped infrastructure impedes sustainable and dynamic economic development.
Welcoming the conferences focus on congestion as of great relevance, Stanishev said that Bulgaria had been increasingly faced with this problem, which has adverse economic effects, especially for Sofia, other major cities, and all places that were part of large transport corridors or had airports or ports.
BTA reported that Bulgarias Transport Minister, Petar Moutafchiev, said that congestion and traffic forecasts were alarming because of the losses that would likely be generated.
The main bottlenecks were the capital cities, other big cities, borders, major motorways, airports and ports because Bulgaria was part of the EU border.
The worst congestion happened where economies were developing rapidly and infrastructure could not meet their needs, Moutafchiev said.
In Sofia alone, congestion caused losses of about 120 million leva a year, Moutafchiev said. The solution would be better-organised public transport, as well as expansion of the underground railway.
Port congestion problems had been solved by increasing through traffic and introducing flexible working time arrangements. As to air transport, congestion was caused mainly by the ground infrastructure, Moutafchiev said.
Moutafchiev had a series of meetings with counterparts.
He and his Romanian counterpart Ludovic Orban discussed one-day vignettes and the Silistra-Calarasi ferry link. The issue of one-day vignettes would be raised at government level because Bulgarian hauliers were paying larger amounts to enter Romania, Moutafchiev said.
Meeting with Russian transport minister Igor Levitin, Moutafchiev discussed a Varna-Caucasus ferry link.
The project for Corridor VIII, which links Bulgaria, Macedonia and Albania, will shortly be presented to the European Commission, Macedonian transport and communications minister Mile Janakievski told the forum.
Bulgaria, Italy, Greece and Romania have applied to the European Commission with a joint project to reduce traffic congestion and ensure road safety, Dimiter Savov, head of the Bulgarian Transport Ministrys Transport Policy Directorate, said on May 30.
The project involves use of high technology and management in traffic regulation. Intelligent systems include signs warning of traffic jams on the motorways, speed warnings, alternative route suggestions and car GPS Systems. For example, the Netherlands and Germany have already put such intelligent systems in place and the results are very good.
