The Zuiderzeelijn as a development motor for the peripheral Northern Netherlands and as an option for Northwestern Germany‪?‬

Introduction – Zweeftrein of Luchtfiets?

Een radicale verbetering van de infrastructuur (quantum leap)
is een noodzakelijke randvoorwaarde voor de verbetering
van de economische structuur van Nederland
M.C.J. van Pernis
(Voorzitter Consortium Transrapid Nederland)

In the late 1990s the Dutch government mandated the Langman commission (named after its chairman, the former liberal minister of economic affairs, Hargert Langman) to develop a guideline for the northern provinces of the Netherlands to overcome the economic arrear compared to the Randstad, the economic heart of the country. One crucial part of the advice the Commission made in 1998 was the creation of a fast public transport connection (often mentioned as the Zuiderzeelijn) between the Randstad and Groningen over the Flevopolder to stimulate the economic development of the north by connecting it to the Randstad. However, many different possibilities to fulfil this advice have been discussed. The most spectacular and most controversial transport option is the magnetic levitation train, the so-called Transrapid, which has recently been built in Shanghai (China). This option is not only supposed to be the fastest but is also supposed to most sustainably stimulate the economic development in the north. This track must be seen in an European context as well. The German federal states of Hamburg, Bremen and Lowe Saxony (Niedersachsen) announced interest in building the track further over Leer, Oldenburg and Bremen to Hamburg, if the ultimate decision of the Dutch government will be in favour of the Transrapid technology. Even a north-European approach could be imaginable in the opinion of some visionaries, an Eurorapid Amsterdam-Hamburg-Stockholm.
The main questions this paper tries to deal with in this context are
• How far can a Transrapid connection between Amsterdam and Groningen (and possibly Hamburg and Stockholm) stimulate the development of the peripheral regions of northern Netherlands and northwestern Germany?
• How can this high-speed connection be seen in the wider context of an European transport policy?
• Have the expectations of spatial and economic effects been overvalued?

In the first part of the paper the different projects will be introduced and in a second step discussed briefly in their political and socio-economic contexts. The main emphasis lies on the discussion of the effects on the spatial and socio-economic developments in chapter 4. ...