TEN around the Baltic Sea

The goal of TEN was to promote mobility of citizens and goods in the EU. The key point has been to decrease the logistical costs. It is especially important for the Scandinavian countries. In Finland the logistic costs have been some 10 per cent of the business volume of enterprises. In France it has been 6,5, in Germany 4,5 and in UK 4 per cent.

The TEN traffic corridors comprise the network of motorways, railroads and the telematic infrastructure for truck drivers and harbours, airports and other terminals. The priority TEN corridors around the BSR are: the Nordic Triangle, the Rail Baltica and the Baltic Sea Motorway.

The Nordic Triangle is a traffic corridor connecting Copenhagen, Stockholm, Turku, Helsinki, St. Petersburg and also Oslo and Göteborg.

The key project was the Öresund bridge and a tunnel between Malmö and Copenhagen. There is also a plan to continue the rail tracks to Helsingborg and Helsingör, Denmark.

The Swedish railway administration has started to plan high speed connections between Stockholm and Malmö. The construction of Bothnia Banan, the new railway connection from Stockholm to Umea has started in 2005.

Italian Pendolinos of the Finnish Railways VR are running between Helsinki and Turku and also the construction of the last part of the new motorway starts at the end of this year and will be completed in 2009.

Fast speed trains (220 km/h) start to run between Helsinki-St.Petersburg in 2008 or 2011. The journey across the border will take 3 hours and 30 minutes.

The airports of Kastrup/Copenhagen, Arlanda/Stockholm, Vantaa/Helsinki and Gardemoe/Oslo have been developed intensively in 15 years. New terminals have been constructed and they are connected to the highways and the cities' centres.

Rail Baltica and Via Baltica. Via Baltica connects Helsinki-Tallinn-Riga-Kaunas-Warsaw. The motorway with all kinds of technical infrastructure has been improved systematically in the last 15 years, but it still needs large investments. Rail Baltica is one of the 30 priority projects of the EU since 2004. Besides improvements of existing tracks also the new ones must be constructed to ride by train from Tallinn to Riga. In Lithuania it has been discussed to change the track gauge to the Central European standard.

The Baltic Sea Motorway. In modern logistics the storeys are minimized. The production must be delivered as quick as possible, the freight ships must have excact time schedule, in the harbours the passing through time must be minimized, too. In the southern Baltic ports of Rostock, Szczecin, Gdynia and Gdansk are competing with each other. They are attractive for the investors due to the fact of owning huge area for investments.

The City of Helsinki started to plan in 1990 the construction of the new harbour with its shipping route, rail track and the new road connections to be ready to operate in 2008.

Russia constructed quickly two new oil ports, Promorsk and Visotsk by the Bay of Viborg. It seems to be important for the Russian oil enterprises to keep oil business in their own hands. Ventspils, Latvia is competing with these ports having a direct oil pipeline from Russia.