Some Concluding Remarks

Ten-T has been evolving from 1996 to 2013 trying to cope with the enlargement of the European Union and to encourage modal shifts from road and air to rail, inland navigation and short-sea shipping. However, during these notable efforts, little attention has been paid to the global dimension of European connectivity, which now demands a European contribution towards building a Trans-Global network, Twn-T.

Together with addressing a number of technical disruptions affecting transport and its infrastructure, the new wave of Ten-T revision — due by December 2023 — must depart from what has thus far been an introverted view of Europe as a single market (something that has often penalized European competitiveness) to an extroverted orientation of the Union as a key player in a global market.

The growing economic centrality of Asia since China’s accession to WTO; China’s strong interest in the Mediterranean Basin as the “super-hub” that connects four continents; and the eastward shift of the European economic barycentre: all of these developments indicate possible solutions for addressing the “geographical obsolescence” of the current Ten-T.

In parallel, innovation-driven disruption of the worldwide maritime freight transport network and its infrastructure necessitates the streamlining of port nodes and rail networks around the world, in a way that at the same time addresses efficiently the current “technological obsolescence” of big parts of European infrastructure, predominantly of ports.

But the new Ten-T Network evolving into a Twn-T one will not anymore be the product solely of European decisions: dovetailing Ten-T with China’s Belt and Road Initiative will be unavoidable.

Any dovetailing of Ten-T and BRI networks into a possible Twn-T network would profit a lot from the availability of sound methodologies for assessing the systemic consequences of changes in the Twn-T Network due to large infrastructure investments.

Such methodologies do exist even if they are in their infancy. The construction of a global transportation general equilibrium model that could, among others, tackle the routing problem is within reach. The same can be said of methodologies used for analyzing bargaining games on network markets where the bargaining power of each agent (e.g., China or the EU) depends on its position in the network and its reliability in a cooperation scheme.

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