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On 8 December the boards of the Basque Country’s Council of Elected Representatives and its Development Council agreed to adopt a joint opinion on the proposed high-speed train line for Southern Atlantic Europe. The decision gave the green light for the design phase of the project, which will entail rigorous environmental precautions and stipulations about additional link lines so that the entire Basque Country can benefit from the new service.
It was crucially important that Councils took a position on the project, as 31 December marked the end of the ‘public consultation’ procedure. A western TGV line linking Paris and Madrid has featured for some 12 years now on maps of major land infrastructure eligible for EU funding. At last, after much delay and prevarication, we know that the Paris-Bordeaux section will be in place by 2016, with the Spanish section, including the Basque ‘Y’, scheduled for completion between 2010 and 2013. For a while, the French Basque Country had looked in danger of being the missing link on this major trans-European route.
As with all big projects, opposition and concern has been expressed on many fronts: allowing everyone to air their questions and opinions is, after all, the purpose of ‘public consultation’. The Council of Elected Representatives was the first body to call for an independent report, in addition to the information supplied by the French Rail Network RFF. Having taken the environmental recommendations on board, the case for the project seemed convincing.
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