On 17 October, 2013, in Tallinn, Vice-Minister of the Ministry of Transport and Communications of the Republic of Lithuania Arijandas Šliupas attended the grand opening session of “TEN-T days“, where he stated “after two years of hard work in negotiating the new Trans-European Transport Network guidelines and Connecting Europe Facility’s funding, concrete results, in terms of a new seven year funding period, were achieved”.
This is good news for the Member States of the European Union (EU) seeing that the financing of transport infrastructure will triple (up to 26 billion euro) for the period of 2014-2020. The fact that Member States agreed on strengthening infrastructure development coordination and main transport corridor network is very important as it will lead to a closer cooperation with regard the implementation of common projects relevant to various countries.
“I believe that the Connecting Europe Facility and new financial instruments will ensure the implementation of the EU priority projects and improve the internal connections in the European Union. One of the connections in the Baltic Sea region is the “Rail Baltica” project. With the declaration signed by five transport ministers in Vilnius, a decision made by representatives of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to establish a joint venture was made. Therefore, the Baltic States have a possibility to use the European Union’s funding for this project and, in the future, connect Poland, Finland and the rest of the West Europe by building a high speed line. “– said the Vice – Minister of the Republic of Lithuania Arijandas Šliupas.
The Deputy Minister underlined that Lithuania, as a member state with an external EU’s border, spends a lot of energy and time in order to increase the economic integration and create an efficient transport market that involves EU neighboring countries and other states.
A week ago, the Eastern Partnership Transport Ministerial Meeting held in Luxembourg approved the map of Eastern Partnership regional transport network and recommended the European Commission to include it into the trans-European transport network regulations, in this way extending it to the EU Eastern Neighborhood countries.
“We believe that the implementation of these recommendations would be a big step towards closer transport system between the European Union and its Eastern neighboring countries.” – said the Vice-Minister.