80% of Swedish transport infrastructure plan 2022-33 to go to rail 03/12/21

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Source: https://www.tagforetagen.se/2021/12/plan-2022-2033-sma-steg-i-ratt-riktning/

 

Plan 2022–2033 - small steps in the right direction

How do we want our future society to be built? How should we travel and transport ourselves, our purchases of goods and our goods? The answer will be a combination of what is possible today and in the future and of what we want. What we actually want is not an insignificant issue, perhaps it is the most important. When the question is answered in transport policy, accessibility comes into focus, but what kind of accessibility do we as a society demand? On short distances: do we want to travel collectively in and / or in combination with other shared mobility, or is it with our own electric bike or electric car to be parked at the destination? On longer distances: is it sitting in small electric cars on our highways in combination with flights, or in comfortable trains between our city centers? What infrastructure do we want in our cultural landscapes? To the many questions about what we as a society actually want must also be added the climate aspects. Emissions from the transport sector must be reduced significantly faster than hitherto, and a major contribution is the transfer of transport from road to rail.

On 30 November, the Swedish Transport Administration presented its proposal for a new national plan for transport infrastructure 2022–2033. A mixture of sweet and salty. We see that 80 percent of the investments go to railways and that there are cost reductions of SEK 65 billion in the project new main lines. However, we also see that several important measures are late in the plan. It is primarily the government's directive that limits the Swedish Transport Administration's room for maneuver, which means that investments in what is now “hot” Norrland have not been prioritized in the near future and thus that adequate infrastructure is completed long after the industry's new establishments. The industry's signals about ERTMS on-board equipment seem to have passed and the Swedish Transport Administration is arguing strongly for state co-financing. However, the maintenance of the country's infrastructure requires more. The plan proposal contains sensitivity analyzes that do not clarify the benefits of transport efficiency and leave much to be desired. Read more about this and about that (pdf)the plan proposal is, after all, a step in the right direction but that public finances allow more

This year's Railway Day on 24 November - the eighth in a row in collaboration between Swedtrain and Tågföretagen - also had a strong focus on infrastructure as one of the issues of the future. The theme for the day was 2030 - what are we waiting for? After an inspiring day, we can state that we both can and want to solve most things together. Read more about Railway Day in a separate article .

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