National transport policy in Austria – from its beginning till today

First attempts to construct horse-drawn railways in Austria started in the year 1824 to connect Budweis (today České Budějovice in Czech Republic) to the Danube.

The first rail using steam engines was Kaiser-Franz-Ferdinands-Nordbahn opened in 1838, which became a very profitable system in the northern part of Austria. Since 1882, a gradual nationalisation of the railway network of the Austro-Hungarian Empire into the Imperial Royal Austrian State Railways (Kaiserlich-königliche österreichische Staatsbahnen, kkStB) took place.

By the outbreak of the World War I (WWI), the only major railway in Austria to remain in private hands was the Austrian Southern Railway (Südbahn). After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the year 1918, the Austrian rump of kkStB remained in state control under the name Deutschösterreichische Staatsbahnen (DÖStB), which was renamed to Österreichische Staatsbahnen (ÖStB) in 1919. In the year 1923 was the foundation of the independent, commercial enterprise, the Bundesbahn Österreich. This company took over the assets of the ÖStB and the Südbahn, together with other minor railways.

In 1938 was the Anschluss of Austria into the German Empire. The BBÖ was taken over by the Deutsche Reichsbahn. During the World War II (WWII), about 41% of the Austrian railway network was destroyed.

In 1947, the company was reformed using the slightly different name of Österreichische Bundesbahnen and the abbreviation ÖBB as a state-owned company. Their infrastructure was rebuilt and electrification was accelerated. In 1969 a new federal railway law was enacted. The ÖBB became a non-independent, economic entity, which was run as a branch of the government’s industrial programme and remained entirely within the Federal budget.

In 1992 the ÖBB were separated from the federal budget and turned into company with its own legal status. The company was 100% owned by the Republic of Austria. This change had two primary aims: first, it had to conform to EU rules on the admission of Austria into the European Union. Second, the financial demand for public funding was to be reduced as a result of improvements in efficiency and the pressure of competition.

In 2004 the ÖBB were reorganised again into ÖBB Holding AG and a number of operating subsidiaries. The holding company was to oversee the operations of the companies assigned to it, coordinate a coherent strategic approach and allocate tasks for the whole enterprise. In 2005 the subsidiaries of ÖBB-Holding AG became autonomous and independent operationally.³

Electrification of the system began in year 1912 but did not reach to an advanced status until the 1950s. The last steam locomotive in regular service on the standard gauge network retired in year 1978.

According to the Annual Report 2013 [6], the company employs 39,513 people. 13,599 of them are active employees, 24,251 of them are retired employees (still on the payroll of ÖBB) and 1663 apprentices. In 2013, ÖBB-Personenverkehr AG carried 469 million passengers, of which 235 million were bus passengers. The ÖBB rail network length is 4859 km, 72% of which is electrified. The standard gauge is 1435 mm. The ÖBB has 1128 train stations, 1093 locomotives, 2799 passenger carriages and 26,518 freight wagons. It also operates 2200 busses: the ÖBB’s bus services travel 52,500,000 km per year.

In the early period after WW2 road construction was mainly seen as an instrument to reduce unemployment – major road construction activities took place at this time. The road construction activities comprised some stretches of the motorway network, a second focus was put on improvements of trunk roads to enable and foster the tourism, which was growing in this period. The financing of the infrastructure improvement was easily financed from the income generated from the fuel tax paid by the car drivers. In the rail sector the electrification of the main routes of the network was on the agenda. At the end of the 1960s, the demand for fuel became higher than the inland production – to avoid a dependency on a limited number of continental oil suppliers, the government made plans to construct oil pipelines to harbours at the Mediterranean Sea to have access to world-wide oil suppliers. It was also recognised for the first time that water supply and forestry played an important role for future generations.

In the year 1973/1974 Austria, as all other countries, experienced the first Oil Crisis. At this time the government in Austria realized for the first time that an infinite growth in road transport solely based on fossil fuels is not possible. As a short-term measure, in the year 1974, the population in Austria was asked not to drive their car for 1 day per week.⁴ In this period Chancellor Kreisky mentioned in his governmental declaration for the first time that it is necessary for an optimal accessibility within Austria to include all means of transport into a national transport strategy (inclusion of road, rail and short distance public transport). It was also for the first time that the government made the suggestion to concentrate the responsibilities for the rail and the road network into one single ministry - as already mentioned above, it took further 30 years until this was realized. In general, the overall strategy was still focused on road construction – as laid out in the “Dringlichkeitsreihung1972 + 1975” (Road Priority ranking Study 1972 + 1975) [9], which was based on the „Gesamtverkehrskonzept der österreichischen Bundesregierung: September 1968“(Austrian Transport Master Plan 1968) [10]. Also road safety issues became more and more important, and thus funds for road research and road safety research were explicitly dedicated from 1971 onwards to improve here the knowledge [11].

In the 1980s the improvement of the short-distance public transport system was in the focus to enable rural commuters to reach the workplaces in the urban agglomerations without using their own cars. In the rail system, new shunting yards were planned to improve the freight transport on rail as road freight transit through Austria became a serious problem in terms of congestion and environmental issues (noise and air pollution).

At the end of the 1980s, Chancellor Vranitzky postulated in his government declaration that the objectives of the Austrian transport policy should be a shift of the existing transport demand to that mean of transport which has the best properties regarding traffic safety, economic benefits, environment and efficiency.

Additionally a traffic safety campaign was initiated to reduced traffic fatalities comprising safety education at schools, enforcement of speed and alcohol limits for car drivers, and the installation of the so called “Führerschein auf Probe” – a limited driving license for unexperienced car drivers.

In this period also the catalyst duty for private cars was introduced in Austria in 1987 (first country in Europe) [12]. Further restrictions on road transport to shift freight transport to rail comprised the introduction of restrictive speed limits for noisy heavy good vehicles, the introduction of a night drive prohibition on certain sensible routes, and the increase of capacity of piggyback transport within Austria. Also the inland waterway, the river Danube was mentioned; here existing capacities should be utilized in a more efficient way and the cooperation with other countries (mainly eastern European countries) should be improved.

A similar approach was chosen for the national airline: here relations with other European airlines were introduced to improve the overall service level and supply. In the rail sector, it was suggested to simplify the organization structure towards a more service-orientated company. Until the year 1995, the Austrian railway company should deliver comparable benchmark figures as other efficient rail operators in Europe.

In the year 1991, a document describing the Austrian transport policy named “Das Österreichische Gesamtverkehrskonzept 1991 (Austrian Transport Masterplan 1991) [13] was published. In this document the overall objectives of the Austrian transport policy were laid out and a catalogue of measures to reach these goals were listed. To provide an idea, some of the “measures” in the document are listed below:

It is worth mentioning here that, in this document, objectives of a transport policy and measures how to achieve these objectives are mixed up. For example, “Making public transport more attractive” is clearly an objective, whereas “night drive prohibition for lorries” is clearly a policy instrument. This mixing up of objectives and policy instruments is a widespread habit in transport planning and complicates seriously the assessment of policy strategies.

To summarize, as mentioned already in the corresponding government declarations, the focus was to make the public transport more attractive, to reduce road-traffic-related emissions (noise and air pollution) and to introduce the concept of true costs in the transport sector. Another activity at this time was to plan to construct about 60.000 park-and-ride places to motivate commuters to switch from private car to public transport.

In this period the negotiation between Austria and the EU took place to become a full member of the EU. A major issue here was the so called “Transitvertrag”, a contract which should cap the number of heavy good vehicles passing the Brenner route in Austria. For information - the Brenner route is an environmentally sensible route serving as major corridor between Italy and Germany; the emissions caused by the high number of lorries (e.g. 1,55 million lorries in 2001 and 1,95 million lorries in the year 2013) has been a serious issue. To provide an alternative for the road Brenner route, a discussion for the construction of a Brenner rail tunnel was initiated.

In the year 1996 a new document was published by the Austrian government, which integrated the mode-specific master plans into a common intermodal Austrian Master Plan [14]. In this period investment in transport infrastructure again was seen to reduce the unemployment in Austria. To finance the planned infrastructure projects, it was envisaged to use Private Public Partnership models and to generate financing through road pricing (a flat-rate road pricing (Autobahnvignette) on motorways for private cars was introduced in the year 1997).

In the year 2000 the coalition in Austria changed from a Social Democratic and People’s Party coalition to a Peoples Party and Freedom party coalition. In this period a concentration of the agendas of road construction/maintenance and rail network construction/maintenance into a joint ministry called Federal Ministry of Transport, Innovation and Technology Austria (Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie) took place. In the government declaration it was mentioned that the objective of the Austrian transport policy should be the “strengthening of the Austria as a business location”. To archive this objective it was recommended to:

In the year 2007 again there was a change in government coalition from the former People’s Party / Freedom Party coalition to a Social Democratic / People’s Party coalition. This coalition is in place until today. The general orientation in the Austrian transport policy did not change; still the stimulation of the Austrian economic growth through improvements in transport infrastructure is the main focus.

Figure 9 summarises the historical development described before using a time line. In the red rectangles one can see important events happening on an European scale, such as WWI and WWII, the signature of the Austrian Treaty after WWII (year 1955), the 1st Oil Crisis (year 1974), the 2nd Oil Crisis (year 1980), the fall of the Iron Curtain (year 1989), the Maastricht Treaty (year 1993), Austria joining the EU (year 1995), European Transport Policy for 2010: Time to decide (2001), White Paper on Transport (year 2011).

In blue rectangles one can see the publications dates of the “official” published documents dealing with the Austrian transport policy, such as the “Gesamtverkehrskonzept der österreichischen Bundesregierung : September 1968” (Austrian Transport Masterplan 1968) (year 1968), the “Dringlichkeitsreihung1972 + 1975” (Road Priority Ranking study 1972 + 1975) (year 1978), the “Dringlichkeitsreihung 1980” (Road Priority Ranking study 1980) (year 1980), the foundation of the ASFINAG – Austrian motorway financing corporation in year 1982, the “Das Österreichische Gesamtverkehrskonzept 1991” (Austrian Transport Master Plan 1991) (year 1991), the “Der österreichische Bundesverkehrswegeplan” (Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan 1998) (year 1998), the “GSD Studie” (Design Study of Road Transport Network in the Danube Region – Study) (year 1999), the “GVP-Ö” (Austrian Transport Master Plan 2002) (year 2002) and the “Gesamtverkehrsplan für Österreich” (Austrian Transport Master Plan 2013) (year 2013).

Figure 9 relates all these documents and events to the population and car number development (on the left side Y-axis) and to the relative development of the consumed transport energy and the GDP per head development (on the right side Y-axis) for the period 1900 to 2015.

In this section an overview of the published documents regarding transport policy is given. Column 1 of Table 1 shows the year of publication. In column 2 the official abbreviation of the document is shown, then the full name in German and the responsible author(s) are listed. In the column headed “Objectives” the main objectives, listed within the specific document regarding transport policy are shown. In the column headed “Targets” the target (−indicators) are listed, in the case no target (−indicators) could be found in the document a comment by the author of this paper is shown. In the last column headed “Comments by the author”, remarks concerning the document are provided. In total eight documents were published in Austria dealing with national transport policy in the period between 1968 and today.

The documents listed in Table 1 mainly have the objective to give advice which infrastructure projects should be realized and in which order. Especially the earlier documents focused on the order of implementation under the constraints of financing, construction capacity and employment aspects. The transport policy in Austria in the period 1950–1970 and 1970–1990 can be classified as solely “demand orientated”. Under the term “demand orientated” provision of infrastructure one can understand that the infrastructure was built because the demand, mainly the demand for car mobility, should be satisfied. No transport demand management measures to reduce/steer the demand for car mobility were taken into consideration or included in the national Austrian transport policy in these periods.

In the document GVK-Ö 1991 for the first time the objective “Avoidance of unnecessary traffic” was mentioned. Unfortunately no monitor-able target (−indicators) were defined in this document, so it was not possible to assess the implemented strategies against these indicators.

As it can be seen, this was only a very short period. In the following published documents the economic point of view in transport policy making became again the dominating objective, which can be clearly seen when looking at the objectives of the BVWP (year 1998), the objectives of the GSD-Study (year 1999) and the GVP-Ö (year 2002), where the main objectives were the “Strengthening of Austria as a business location”. The paradigm “Avoidance of unnecessary traffic” completely disappeared from the agenda in the period between 1998 and 2013.

The last published document, the Gesamtverkehrsplan für Österreich (year 2013), again is now a modern, comprehensive TMP, where infrastructure improvements and also transport demand management measures are included and also monitor-able target (−indicators) are provided. This will enable to assess the objective-fulfillment in a later stage. We will see what the Austrian government will achieve with this new attempt to solve the Austrian transport challenges.