Baltic Sea - Adriatic Sea corridor

Overview

The Baltic Sea-Adriatic Sea (BSAS) European Transport Corridor (ETC) extends in the North from the Polish Baltic Sea ports of Gdańsk and Gdynia as well as Szczecin and Świnoujście and the city of Biała Podlaska through Kłodzko, Kraków and the Katowice region to Brno in the Czechia and Bratislava in Slovakia. It stretches further to Vienna in Austria and Budapest in Hungary and its Eastern branch ends in the Slovenian port of Koper and the Croatian ports of Rijeka and Split. The Western branch to Italy connects  Bologna and the ports of Trieste, Venice, Ravenna, and Bari. 

Corridor infrastructure

The BSAS corridor comprises more than 10,000 km of railway tracks and over 5,500 km of roads. The corridor connects multimodal freight terminals located in 12 seaports and in 5 inland waterway ports along the Danube with 28 rail-road terminals. A total of 52 urban nodes are part of the corridor, including the capital cities of Warszawa, Wien, Bratislava, Budapest, Ljubljana and Zagreb. The BSAS corridor includes 17 airports of which Warszawa, Wien and Budapest register an annual traffic of over 12 million passengers. 

Main bottlenecks and missing links

A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. It is of strategic importance to modernise the rail infrastructure in cohesion countries, improve the hinterland connections of the corridor ports, and to develop the corridor infrastructure in the urban nodes and their integration in the TEN-T network. Among the key projects are Semmering base tunnel in Austria, the high speed railway lines in Czechia and Poland, the second railway track between Koper and Divača, the new railway line between Rijeka and Zagreb in Croatia and the Central Communication Hub in Poland. 

Challenges ahead

Huge efforts have been made to turn the corridor into an efficient transport axis for growth and jobs in Central Europe. It will be critical to complete the BSAS by 2030 for the core network and 2040 for the extended core network. A large number of projects to improve the corridor infrastructure and ensure compliance with the requirements of TEN-T Regulation are already ongoing or planned. These investments concern the modernisation of the existing railway lines, roads, ports and airports, and the construction of new links, last-mile connections to logistic and urban nodes. The BSAS is also important for the military mobility.

The BSAS constitutes also a platform bringing together various stakeholders, including the corridor Member States, EU institutions, infrastructure managers and users in a permanent dialogue for a more competitive and greener Single European Transport Area.