Stalled Bridge Project

Uncertainty dominates any discussion about building a toll bridge across the 14-kilometer (nine-mile) Fehmarn Belt, as the strait between Germany and southern Denmark is called. The project has been under discussion for 15 years, and one German chancellor after another has found a way to avoid it. Now, however, a decision could be imminent.

Hopes were high that it would be a subject when Chancellor Angela Merkel and her Danish colleague, Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen, met in December. But the press was unable to pin her down after the talks.

"Our decision must be made on a sound basis," was all she would say.

Symbolic value

Scandinavia is not short of links to what the Nordic countries refer to as Europe. Since completion of two major bridges in the last decade, travelers have been able to drive over land and bridges from Sweden through Denmark to Germany. Ferries also shuttle traffic regularly between the countries. They ply the Fehmarn Belt, between Danish Rodby and German Puttgarden every half hour, a crossing that takes 45 minutes.

But when the lines get long at the ferry terminals during school vacations, the wait plus the journey can add up to an hour and a half. And taking the land and bridge route through Denmark to Germany adds 100 kilometers (62 miles) to the journey south.

The Scandinavians see the bridge as an important connection to Europe. The route would complement the existing links to create a direct north-south highway corridor from Oslo and Stockholm to Hamburg and other economic centers further south.

The European Union has pinpointed the route as one of the priorities of its Trans-European Networks (TEN), which aim to bring the bloc's regions closer together. If the project comes together the EU could pay a quarter of the costs.

Feasibility studies carried out by the German and Danish authorities predicted that the traffic would quickly double to 8,000 cars, 1,000 heavy trucks and 4,000 train passengers daily even if the existing ferry lines remained in place, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung wrote recently.

The missing link

But the crucial issue is how to finance the project, which is expected to cost around 5 billion euros ($6.5 billion).

Merkel's Christian Democrats and the Social Democrats decided in their 2005 coalition agreement to use the Fehmarn Bridge as an international model for a public-private partnership. The idea favored by the Danes and Schleswig-Holstein is that a Danish-German group will finance the project with money earned on capital markets and be backed up by guarantees from the Danish and German governments.

Critics, however, fear that taxpayers will have to foot the bill in the end, according to Danish transport expert Per Homann Jespersen of the University of Roskilde.

"It's spoken of by (Danish) politicians as the missing link," Jespersen said. "They don't care so much that it's financially sound."

One of the models that supporters of the Fehmarn project refer to is the highly symbolic Oresund Bridge, which connects Sweden and Denmark between the cities of Malmo and Copenhagen.

The construction was initially deemed a financial flop. Fewer cars and trucks traversed the bridge than expected, opting instead to take longer but cheaper routes to cross the water.

"The Oresund Bridge is not a big success for long-distance traveling. It's a regional bridge," Jespersen said, adding that it had worked out in another way, namely by sparking a boom in the area.

Regional growth

Last year around 16,000 vehicles crossed the bridge, twice as many as five years ago. More than 20,000 passengers took the train across every day, an increase of 40 percent over the previous year.

The bridge has made it much easier, and above all faster, for people to commute between the two countries than in the days when ferries connected the cities. Every 20 minutes, the train brings passengers from the Danish to the Swedish side in just 35 minutes. Swedes are attracted to the higher wages paid in Denmark, while significantly lower property rates give many Danes a financial incentive to move abroad.

The Danes are hopeful that a bridge over the Fehmarn Belt will bring them an economic boom, too. It's hard to imagine though that the rural region would replicate the success of the Oresund area, where two important Scandinavian cities are located. Still, Politicians near Rodby, a poorer part of Denmark, have been lobbying hard for the project, as has the state government of Schleswig-Holstein, where Fehmarn is located.

Looking ahead

The locals are less enthusiastic. On the German side, people fear that the financial risk is too high. They're also concerned that tourism would suffer during construction of the bridge and never recover. Instead, the area could just become a transit route. In both countries, there are concerns that hundreds of jobs working at the ferry companies could disappear.

Germany's transport ministry is said to be examining the plans and consultations between officials in Berlin and Copenhagen continue. The German government is expected to come to a decision in the next month or two.

Jespersen was reluctant to speculate on the outcome. He said he had begun to doubt whether the bridge project's future would indeed be resolved sooner rather than later. But he was optimistic about the future.

"I'm sure that in 10 or 20 years we will have decided it," he said. "It will be totally up to the Germans."