Infrastructures: the necessary debate

Abstract

The National Federation of Transport, Communications and Maritime Activities of Comisiones Obreras (FETCOMAR-CCOO), a trade union, has long seen a planning of Transport as necessary. The paper, by a union representative, is all in favour of the PDI's having been drawn up, and sees its being presented as giving rise to an intense and essential social debate on the infrastructures issue. The union's evaluation is founded upon the philosophy underlying the plan. The plan's being a working document is seen here to be something positive as is the planning effort that it presupposes, its implied keeping up of investment, its choice of an intermodal option and the opening up of new debates such as that upon the financing of infrastructures. In the negative balance, it puts the plan's limiting itself to infrastructures rather than the model of Transport as such, its possible political instability, its lack of a more concrete reference and priorities, a certain concentration shown of investment, its a negative ecological outcome and its being out of step with the findings of the EEC White Book on Transport. In the light of the above, the paper calls for a discussion of the plan open to the widest social spectrum possible and this under the most favourable of political conditions, this along with a focussing for the issue more in keeping with the findings of the EEC White Paper.