Since ancient times, transport infrastructure has been an expression of the needs, problems, possibilities, and aspirations of the contemporary era. The challenges it faced inspired unconventional solutions that still amaze today.
Transport infrastructure has always fulfilled many different tasks:
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it satisfied specific socio-economic needs by providing spatial connections
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it implemented transport policy tasks by imposing the manner in which these connections were provided
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it shaped the heritage of the past – infrastructure with a long lifespan permanently influenced spatial development, and its facilities often became architectural monuments and symbols of the places where they were realized.
The definition of infrastructure determines its essential role in economic development (as the foundation of this development). The service nature of transport means that its development is stimulated by needs, or rather, the planned needs of the economy. It follows that there are close interdependencies between economic development, transport development, and transport infrastructure.
These have different characters, scopes, and strengths of impact on individual fields, and are the cause of various types of direct and indirect effects of transport development. The enormous diversity of both the place and time of the occurrence of the effects of transport infrastructure development means that many of them are not associated with this development at all, the consequence of which is their omission when assessing the economic profitability of its development and determining the directions of investment policy.
Some indirect effects, although usually linked to transport development, are often omitted in such analysis due to their difficult-to-measure or even immeasurable nature, although the difficulty of measurement or immeasurability of effects is not synonymous with their marginal character. Sometimes these immeasurable effects can be fundamental under specific socio-economic conditions.
The interdependencies occurring in the development of transport infrastructure can be divided into:
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internal (intra-transport), occurring within the transport system
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external (extra-transport), occurring between transport and other sectors of the economy and, in effect, the entire economy.
Internal connections can be divided into intra-branch, occurring within a specific branch of transport, and inter-branch, occurring between different branches of transport.
Infrastructure and sustainable transport development
Infrastructure, as the basis for transport development, is closely linked to other elements of transport systems – means of transport, transport technologies, and progress in this field necessitates the adaptation of all elements, if not as a condition for the functioning of individual branches, then certainly as a condition for their efficiency. Their mutual mismatch can cause serious disruptions in the functioning of a branch (reduced efficiency due to the failure to utilize the possibilities offered by one of the elements, losses resulting from “bottlenecks”, or even restrictions on the movement of transport vehicles on certain routes with different parameters).
The strong connections occurring between the constituent elements of individual transport branches, as well as the specific features of infrastructure, lead to the emergence of certain regularities in the process of transport development and exert a significant influence on transport policy. They mean:
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the existence of strong limitations imposed by the current state of development (disregarding these limitations may lead to a significant increase in the scope of investments or a decrease in their efficiency due to the incomplete use of mutually mismatched constituent elements of these branches)
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the necessity of particularly cautious transition to new technologies and relatively low susceptibility to the influences of technical progress (too rapid introduction of technical novelties may cause the isolation of the area where they were introduced – thus, given the high capital intensity of infrastructure investments in transport, this is quite risky); however, too late implementation of new technologies can also cause the effect of isolating an area with obsolete technologies
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a large scope of investments in the case of introducing new solutions that affect the change of currently applicable infrastructure parameters
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the necessity of intra-branch coordination of investments as a condition for achieving the full effects of modernization; at the same time, the territorial scope of coordination efforts should be as wide as possible.
The process of mutual adaptation of the constituent elements of individual branches is quite complicated, especially on an international scale, due to the different preferences and investment possibilities of various investors. A way to facilitate the solution of these problems is the unification of the basic constituent elements of individual branches, which causes facilities realized in different places and times by different investors to form an integral element of the transport system in the area where the principles of unification are respected. The presented regularities are current in the process of developing modern transport infrastructure, even though initiatives aimed at standardizing the layout and parameters of transport networks and eliminating bottlenecks and missing links on an international scale (priority investments on the transport networks of European Union countries) have long been undertaken. They are revealed, for example, acutely in the process of high-speed rail development. Countries that decided to modernize the existing road network and adapt modern rolling stock to it (for example, with tilting bodies) deprived themselves of the possibility of using the latest solutions on these routes, which, however, require new infrastructure. This problem unfortunately also occurs in Poland, which, on the most attractive (from the point of view of transport distance and demand) North-South and East-West routes, undertook the process of modernizing the railway network, crossing out for many years the chances of implementing the high-speed rail concept in these relations. The initiative to develop high-speed rail in Poland, undertaken almost thirty years after the launch of the first such line in France (TGV Paris-Lyon, in 1981), necessary to overcome the growing distance in this regard compared to other EU countries, is therefore a compromise between needs and possibilities, limited by earlier decisions regarding the scope of railway line modernization.
The article comes from the journal “Logistyka” 1/2011.