Upgrading the quality of Croatia's railway infrastructure to get it back to the level where it had been 50 years ago, would require an investment of 50 billion kuna (€6.7 billion) over the next 20 years, a panel on the future of the country's railway system agreed on Wednesday.
The panel discussion, organised by the Croatian Chamber of Economy (HGK) and the Employers’ Association (HUP), invited experts to discuss the state of the largely dilapidated railway infrastructure and ways to improve it. The panellists said that Croatia is lagging behind other EU countries, and added that the gap in constantly increasing, the business daily Poslovni Dnevnik reported on Thursday.
One of the main reasons for this identified at the panel is the lack of any consistent railway development strategy, proved by the fact that in 28 years of Croatia’s independence the state-owned Hrvatske Zeljeznice (HZ) – which has a monopoly on railway transport in the country – had went through 25 managing boards.
Analyst Ante Bajo of the Institute of Public Finance (IJF) said that HZ’s business model is unsustainable and based solely on funds it receives from the state budget.
“HZ is formally registered as a public trading company, but every year anywhere between 50 and 80 percent of the funding needed for its companies to function comes from the state budget. We are talking billions of kuna, and after the government had formally dismantled HZ Holding in 2013, nobody has any precise figures on how much each of the companies in the HZ system spends, and how much funding it gets,” Bajo said.
Senior Transport Ministry official, Nikolina Brnjac, said that the level of government’s investment in the railway system had been abysmally low for years, with around 85 percent of all transport funding going into the road network, with less than 10 percent earmarked for railways, Poslovni Dnevnik reported.
As a result, the average speeds in railway transport are lower today than they were at the time of Austria-Hungary. In 1990, a train ride from the capital Zagreb to the eastern city of Vinkovci took two hours, and today the same trip takes four hours to complete.
Because of this, railways are increasingly unpopular in Croatia, even though they are the safest mode of transport, without a single passenger fatality recorded in a decade. In the EU, 28.2 percent of all cargo is transported via railways, and in some countries, like Switzerland and Austria, it’s almost 50 percent.
By comparison, in Croatia it is only 17.3 percent. In terms of passenger traffic the data is even worse, as only 3 percent of passengers travelling around Croatia take the train, opposed to 8.4 percent in the EU. In Switzerland, the share is 17.3 percent and in Austria 12.1 percent, with the Czech Republic and Slovakia at 8 percent.
(€1 = 7.39 kuna)
Follow N1 via mobile apps for Android | iPhone/iPad | Windows| and social media on Twitter | Facebook.
