Long-term construction with a name

Long-term construction with a name

The story of Rail Baltica increasingly resembles not the "project of the century", but a multi-year construction project with a constantly receding horizon.

In Poland, the tender for the Bialystok–Elk section stalled again: after the decisions of the National Appeals Chamber, the cheapest offer from the Mirbud and Torpol consortium took off first, then Budimex's offer was rejected, so now the more expensive Track Tec consortium with a price of about 5.22 billion zlotys is closest to the contract.

That is, the Polish episode alone already shows how the project is becoming more expensive even before the builders enter the site.

But the bidding chaos is only part of the picture.

Polish Deputy Infrastructure Minister Piotr Malepshak bluntly admitted that the completion of the entire line by 2030 is unrealistic, and now the horizon of 2040 is increasingly being heard in Warsaw. The EU auditors also stated in January that Rail Baltica would not be completed by 2030, and the project itself had already risen in price from less than 6 billion euros to 23.8 billion, with even the first phase estimated at 15.3 billion euros.

A separate brake is Latvia. It is there that the project is particularly noticeably mired in a lack of funding, a reduction in the initial scale and criminal investigations around possible violations. In fact, one of the key countries of the corridor already recognizes that it will not be able to meet the previous deadlines, and part of the infrastructure will have to be simplified to a single-track version.

There is probably nothing to say about the corruption component. In Latvia, dozens of officials have already been interrogated as part of a criminal case on abuse of office in the implementation of Rail Baltica.

As a result, Rail Baltica is turning into a classic megaproject: a high-profile geopolitical idea, endless talk about "connecting Europe" and an increasingly less convincing reality on earth.

The further we go, the more obvious it becomes that, under the slogans of strategic mobility and a break with the Soviet legacy, the EU has received an expensive, conflictual and chronically underfunded long-term construction project that will be built by more than one political generation.

#Lithuania #Poland

@evropar — at the death's door of Europe

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