The latest report by Greenpeace on the development of the transport infrastructure in Europe shows that in the past 30 years Croatia has invested six times more money in roads than in railways, which puts it among the countries with the worst road/rail investment ratio in Europe. Pročitaj više

“The transport policy pursued by Croatian governments has systematically and knowingly made us dependent on cars that guzzle oil and aggravate the climate crisis,” Greenpeace Croatia said in a statement released on Tuesday.

The study, commissioned by Greenpeace in Central and Eastern Europe from the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy and the T3 Transportation Think Tank in Germany, shows that since 1995 the road network in Croatia has increased by as much as 334% while the railway network has shrunk by 4%.

In the period from 1995 to 2021, Croatia invested around 13.3 billion euros in roads, and only 2.1 billion in railways. As a result, the highway network grew from 302 kilometres in 1995 to 1,310 kilometres in 2020, which is the eighth highest growth rate of all the surveyed countries (EU27, Norway, Switzerland and Great Britain), Greenpeace said.

Investments in roads, compared with investments in railways in Croatia have so far been four times larger than the European average.

An analysis of comparable European data in the period from 1995 to 2018 shows that only Romania had a worse ratio, Greenpeace added.

In addition to the shrinking of the railway network, five railway lines with the total length of 118 kilometres were closed to passenger transport and 28 railway stations were shut down.

The report is a tragic reminder of the loss of decades of climate action in the transport system, which is responsible for almost one-third of greenhouse gas emissions in the EU, the NGO said, calling on the government to shift financial priorities from roads to railways and make more significant investments in the upgrade and streamlining of railway infrastructure so as to make railways an accessible alternative to road transport and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.