A boy holds up a wooden banner on which he painted a truck with the inscription 'stinker' during a demonstration on the highway A12 near Kramsach.(AFP/DDP/File/Johannes Simon)
Posted on 04/07/2004 8:22:05 PM PDT by NormsRevenge
VIENNA (AFP) -
Demonstrators blocked key motorway links between Germany and Italy through the Austrian Alps for a third day in protest against the threat of pollution caused by new EU relaxations on truck traffic.
Two motorways were paralysed with long tailbacks of vehicles through the Inntal Valley in western Tyrol and the Tauern between Salzburg and Upper Austria, a motoring association spokesman said.
"Several hundred demonstrators blocked vehicles for kilometres in the Inntal near Innsbruck and in both directions of the Tauern tunnel," he said.
Trucks were expected to be trapped in the Inntal until early Thursday because the demonstration was followed by a local ban on night motorway, he added.
Environmentalists sent a manifesto to relevant ministries in EU member countries Wednesday calling for wider restrictions on night traffic and for plans for new highways to be curtailed.
Austrian Vice-Chancellor and Transport Minister Hubert Gorbach, a member of the extreme right-wing Freedom Party, Wednesday reaffirmed his support for the protest, which is also supported by the Greens environmentalist party.
He did not rule the possibility of road tolls being introduced as in neighbouring Switzerland.
The blockade began on Monday when 300 people, mostly environmental activists, stopped traffic on the A10 highway, which runs from Germany to Slovenia, creating a three-kilometre-long (two-mile-long) queue of trucks outside Salzburg.
The Chamber of Commerce (news - web sites) estimated that the three-day protest would cost the European economy between 40 and 60 million euros (48 and 73 million dollars).
A spokesman for the Austrian Transport Forum said they were trying to "send a clear Easter warning" to politicians that new restrictions on heavy goods traffic were needed.
Austria, a major transit zone between northern and southern Europe, fears that foreign trucks are causing permanent harm to its ecologically sensitive mountain areas and that traffic would increase once 10 mostly central European nations join the EU on May 1.
The country wanted to reduce traffic through the Austrian Alps by means of toll charges, and with the help of increased motorway police checks.
But the EU Commission in Brussels last December eased some of the restrictions on heavy goods traffic that Austria negotiated when it joined the EU, ruling that Austria cannot impose a limit on the number of trucks using its roads.
The decision was implemented in January and recent study found that traffic had increased by 2.2 percent in the first months of 2004 compared to the same period last year.
Environmentalists say that as a result the level of gas emissions on highways exceed the limits set by the 1991 Alpine Convention.
Experts from two Viennese universities were Wednesday quoted in the press as saying that foreign trucks failed to obey the ban on night driving and that plans to build new highways would benefit mainly foreign transport, and therefore Austria's business competition.
A boy holds up a wooden banner on which he painted a truck with the inscription 'stinker' during a demonstration on the highway A12 near Kramsach.(AFP/DDP/File/Johannes Simon)
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