Project information
Transport Integration for Prosperity. The Importance of Rail Connections for the Internal Cohesion of Visegrad Countries.

Development of railway transport and strengthening of functional cross-border connection are among the main priorities set by the European Union. V4 countries tend to approach this issue incoherently, and the absence of any plan and coordinated development slows down improvement of regions’ internal cohesion. Due to historical events which had affected dispersion and structure of the population, and due to economic and political transformation and restructuring of each nation’s economy and economies of individual regions, which are coupled with geographically difficult conditions (marginalized, or structurally affected areas in mountains), create vast peripheral districts in cross-border areas and sometimes even between home regions.
The objective of the project will be a comparison of transport policies of V4 member countries in the segment of public railway transport on the level of international long-distance, regional, and local cross-border connection, for which both qualitative and quantitative approaches shall be used. The comparison will be based on political-economic and transport-geographical analysis of the present situation, and on the identification of capacities and risks of possible future development. The project will strive to define variations of possible measures which will lead to harmonization of individual V4 countries’ approaches in such a way as to support the cohesion of cross-border regions as much as possible. The project will result in an output consisting of a set of analyses of a transport policy and transport-geographical links in the individual countries, and among them. Political-economic studies will focus on organization of public railway transport and the way it is financed in individual countries. Fulfilment of the conditions of the European transport policy, or “railway packets”, in connection with gradual liberalization of the railway market, will represent a significant aspect of the outputs. Transport-geographical analyses will focus on monitoring of the offer in assessed types of transport services.