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Towards a Community policy on sustainable transport

The Economic and Social Committee has approved the European Commission's decision to review the common transport policy up to the year 2004 with a regard to improving efficiency and competitiveness, improving quality and external effectiveness. However the Committee regrets t...

The Economic and Social Committee has approved the European Commission's decision to review the common transport policy up to the year 2004 with a regard to improving efficiency and competitiveness, improving quality and external effectiveness. However the Committee regrets that the Commission had not gone further with its review, developing priorities and objectives for the CTP until 2010. The ESC believes that sustainable mobility requires a transport policy that meets current and future economic, social and environmental goals by getting maximum efficiency from current technologies and developing new sustainable technologies. It would therefore like the CTP to refocus around social, economic and environmental objectives. Given this change in focus, the ESC believes a sense of urgency and vitality must be adopted by the new Commission. The Committee would like to encourage the use of transport statistics in support of transport policy, and recommends that a factually based progress report would inject the sense of urgency the project requires. Whilst recognising the principle of subsidiarity in urban and suburban transport issues, the ESC believes such issues are so central to the general evolution of transport policy that the Council and Commission should give them top priority. Furthermore the Committee believes that the development and volume of personal private transport should be a major strategic issue in the CTP. Spatial planning policy, whilst a matter of Member State discretion, is also a crucial issue for Community transport policy as a whole, and the Committee believes that land use must be planned in a consistent way for CTP goals to be met.