Bruno Bernard and the Metropolis withdraw from the Committee for the Transalpine
Last Thursday, Bruno Bernard hinted during the Club de la Presse lunch that the love affair with Lyon-Turin was turning sour.
The environmentalist president of the Metropolis of Lyon promised that he would not pay a penny for the rail project. And that he “will not finance the Committee for the Transalpine for very long”.
Less than a week later, the sentence fell: this Tuesday, the Métropole de Lyon wrote to the Committee to notify it of its withdrawal from the association. “This decision resulted in the observation of radical differences of opinion on the way to improve the transalpine connections and to work for the general interest”explains the community in a press release.
The Vice-President in charge of Transport, Jean-Charles Kohlhaas, signed the letter in which he “regrets that the Committee for the Transalpine has never ceased, since its creation in 1992, to defend an approach by infrastructure to the problem of crossing the Alps. As a result, the association has constantly denigrated the capacities and potential modernization of the current Dijon-Ambérieu-Chambéry-Modane and Sant-André-le-Gaz-Chambéry lines, just as it ignored the many expert reports pointing to the lack of socio-economic profitability and the environmental cost of the Lyon – Turin project such as defined at the end of the 2000s. From 2018, when the State undertook to better rationalize the program of French access to the cross-border section, the Committee for the Transalpine became active in order to slow down or even thwart the process”.
Finally, the Metropolis deplores “the very nature and operation of the association “mixing public and private interests with the aim of putting pressure on the decision-making process in favor of a large national and European infrastructure”. For 30 years, the Métropole de Lyon has spent more than 900,000 euros in contributions, at the service of an organization which has proven neither its usefulness nor its ability to tolerate argumentative debate within its bodies”.
Bruno Bernard had named last Thursday that he was President of the Republic, he “does not know (if he) would develop rail freight because we are so behind (that it is) no longer certain that this is the policy that must be done today”. However, the community remains attached “to the development of rail transport between France and Italy”.
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