Inter-Connected Europe: From Network to Network
Jeff Thurston
Plans for an inter-connected Europe include provision and prioirity placed upon transportation. Cites are connected by roads and roads connect places. As the European Commission says, “measures to encourage major infrastructure investments, change the way freight moves and people travel would boost economic competitiveness and create jobs. The plan – with goals to be met by 2050 – focuses on travel within cities and between cities, and on long distance journeys.”
It includes calls for:
- cities to completely phase out petrol cars
- shifting to rail or water 50% of all passenger and freight road transport currently making intercity journeys of more than 300km
- airlines to increase their use of sustainable low-carbon fuels to 40%
- shipping to cut 40% off its carbon emissions.
A new European Transport Plan describes these goals.
Several rail networks for Europe can be seen on this map of Trans-National Rail Networks. Telecom Ramblings Blog includes a large number of European maps and cartographic products for telecoms in each country – their coverage areas are shown map-by-map. Earlier I wrote about Solar and Wind Mapping across Europe here.
The combination of infrastructure including transport, telecoms and energy is generally considered to be the main thematic areas for generating economic growth and social stability in a pan-European sense. Environment ties into each of these.
Bentley’s GeoWeb Publisher joins ArcGIS for INSPIRE as strong supporters for meeting Pan_European goals oriented around infrastructure, local government and transport. Each combines design, CAD * GIS intergration capabilities for geospatial data and has strong transport related functionality. A survey of European national mapping agencies and their capabilities was also conducted recently.
While much of the effort is directed toward cities, rural areas are gaining importance. And, in a transport sense, we can only expect that they will dominate discussions in the days ahead.