Trans-European transport network: seaports, inland ports, intermodal terminals and project No 8

At first reading under codecision procedure, the European Parliament approved the proposal for a European Parliament and Council decision amending decision 1692/96/EC as regards seaports, inland ports and intermodal terminals as well as project 8 in Annex III. The report by Willhelm Ernst Piecyk (PSE,DE) proposes amendments, notably in the following areas: - rejecting the idea of a White Paper on the TEN guidelines and instead requiring the Commission to submit a report in 1999 on the existing guidelines, followed by suitable legislative proposals where appropriate; - providing that the strategic environmental impact assessmeent referred to in decision 1692/96/EC should incorporate ports and intermodal terminals; - removing references to the Commission's communication of 29/05/97 on "Trans-European Rail Freight Freeways"; - providing that the inland ports included in the network shall have a total annual traffic volume of at least 500,000 tonnes of freight or be equipped with transhipment installations for intermodal transport; - requiring that the seaports included in the network provide connections with other trans-European transport routes detailed in the decision's Annex I; - requiring that total annual traffic volume for the seaports included must be no less than 1.5 million tonnes of freight (rather than 1 million as proposed by the Commission); - extending the exception for the islands of the Aegean and Ionian seas (allowing them to include domestic traffic in calculating total annual traffic volume) to include the outermost regions as defined by the Treaty on European Union; - extending the decision to cover railways and inland waterways suitable for combined transport and shipping which, combined where appropriate with the shortest possible initial and/or terminal road haulage, permit the long-distance transport of goods; - defining "intermodal transport" within the meaning of the proposed decision; - inclusion on the map of the outline plan for combined transport of the Elbe-Lübeck and Twente Mittelland canals as well as special indication of those inland ports which also perform a seaborne role and those which are not intermodal but have an annual volume of freight transhipment of over 500,000 tonnes; - providing a detailed definition of port infrastructure inside a port area; - indicating that enterprise-related port superstructure investments and operating aids for this purpose are not eligible for Community TENs funding, with the exception of regions eligible for Structural or Cohesion Funds, provided this does not impair fair competition between and within Community seaports; - extending eligible actions beyond electronic data interchange (IDA) to include other intelligent management systems for freight and passenger traffic using integrated technologies; - extending eligible actions to include creation or restructuring of centres for transhipments between modes of land transport, with the infrastructure pertaining to them; - regarding project 8 in Annex III, specifying that a multimodal link between Portugal/Spain and the rest of Europe should be achieved by completing and structuring rail, road, sea and airtransport links in the 3 principal Iberian corridors.�