Infrastructure, Tariff and Legal Action: How to Achieve a Climate-Friendly Transport System

Transportation absorbs about 70% of oil consumption in EU countries. The fuels that burn in the field of transport are composed of 96% of oil. Energy efficiency of road and air traffic must also be improved. But transport environmental impacts reductions should be made necessarily through a transfer of traffic from the car, lorries and aircraft to train, ship, and non motorized two-wheelers into the EU cities. In fact the former are large producers of greenhouse gases, while the latter are more environmentally friendly means of transport in climate. Reaching an annual increase of 1% of the modal split in favour of more sustainable means of transport on the environment must be set as a goal ecologic. Legal, infrastructure and tariff measures have to be proposed, in addition to technical measures (reduction of traffic, growth in the energy efficiency of vehicles, reduction of ravelled distances, improved logistics, etc.). Legal measures refer to possible law limits in terms on fuel consumption and CO2 emissions due to traffic set by the EU. Infrastructure measures can be distinguished on the basis of the concerned territory. On the one hand there is the city, where it seems appropriate to move with intermodal chain, more secure and environmentally friendly. On the other hand there are fundamentally the suburbs, where investment in new transport infrastructures may be contradictory in terms of climate protection. Tariff measures express the already established concept of "who produces pollution, he pays". The external costs generated by different modes of transport have to be progressively turned over to users.