Europe shippers warn about antipollution fees

Europe shippers warn about antipollution fees    The European Shippers Council is criticizing a Council of Ministers of Transport agreement reached last Friday that would allow European Union members to charge heavy lorries not only for infrastructure costs, but also to cover the costs of air and noise pollution.
   The EU said the proposal to revise the current “Eurovignette Directive” would enable member states to better manage problems of congestion, with a new flexibility to differentiate the charges applied to heavy lorries at different periods of the day.
   Siim Kallas, European Commission vice president responsible for Transport, said the action was “an important step in the right direction. It is part of a much broader drive to create a “fair financial” framework for transport where prices for the different transport modes reflect the real costs to society and the taxpayer. These new rules send the right signals to operators. The aim is to provide incentives to shift behavior so companies invest in more efficient logistics, less polluting vehicles and more sustainable transport at large.”

van der Jagt

   But Nicolette van der Jagt, ESC secretary general, said, 'the impact of this proposal, if implemented, could be substantial for Europe's economy, particularly in those regions where there is simply no viable or practical alternative to road freight transport.'
   She said the ministers agreed to allow a maximum variation of the infrastructure charge of 175 percent during a maximum five-hour period per day where member states could justify it on the basis of local congestion problems.
   The ESC said the European Council “is only looking at charging road freight and as yet cannot agree to deal with other modes of transport or passenger and private car use in the same way. ESC believes this compromise agreement is wrong and will not have any significant difference on the environment”
   The shippers group said the change would “merely result in more expensive freight transport, which the rest of the economy will have to pay for.”
   ESC said unlike the European Parliament before it, the Council of Ministers could not reach agreement on the European Commission's proposal to make compulsory the allocation of revenue raised from such charges to specific transport-related projects that would reduce the problems of noise, pollution and reduce accidents.
   ESC favors earmarking. Without it, van der Jagt said, 'member states are free to spend the revenue on what ever they like, and totally unrelated to transport projects that would help reduce the pollution, noise and accident levels.”
   She said her group would seek to have “money derived from road user charges will be transferred back into investme