In the last post I questioned whether Croatia could have had a better person put in as Minister of Maritime Affairs, Transport and Infrastructure. I also questioned whether the country could have had better results if there was someone better than these people put in that position all these years? Would an expert in this field have different priorities in this ministry or maybe a vision or program none of these guys could produce thanks to their lack of expertise?
Here is my answer. I will begin with the vision which is a program that would create 150.000 new jobs and increase GDP by at least 4.5% and achieve that with no new debt or loss of territory.
1. Construction of the lowland, double-track and electrified railway line Rijeka – Zagreb – Botovo.
2. Construction of the main container terminal “Port of Zagreb”.
3. Construction of a large business and logistics hub “Miklavlje”.
4. Development of the “International Business Center Karlovac”
5. Construction of a railway network between port terminals and logistics hubs for internal container transport according to the strict norm of ships of 75 TEU/h
- Preparation of the construction of the new home terminal “Omišalj” on the island of Krk.
- Construction of a new railway-road bridge mainland – island of Krk.
- Construction of the new shunting station “Kraljevica”.
- Construction of the IMONODE railway line Rijeka – Koper – Trieste
- Construction of the Danube – Sava navigable canal (Vukovar – Šamac)
- Construction of the consolidation strategic hub “Rugvica” near Zagreb – Karlovac.
So whose program was this? It was written by Dr. Ivan Miloš.
Dr. Miloš defended his doctoral dissertation, entitled “Information System in the Function of Modern Transport Technology”, at the Faculty of Maritime Affairs and Transport in Rijeka in 1989, and obtained a doctorate in technical sciences in the field of transport technology.
From 1966 to 1998, he worked at the company “Luka” Rijeka, where he performed various jobs and tasks, from technologist – organizer of transhipment on ships and manager of port warehouses to director of OUR “Rijeka” and assistant general director for strategic development.
From 1999 to 2003, he held the position of designer, founder and director of the “Split-Dalmatia Free Zone” Split, which is majority owned by the Split-Dalmatia County.
In 2003, he was invited and elected as a professor at the University of Rijeka, where he received an offer from strategic partners from the European Union, with whom he had previously collaborated, on large development projects in the field of international public transport and creating conditions for FDI (Foreign Direct Investments) capital investments, to be directly involved in new strategic development projects of the EU, the development of which is financed by the European Commission with non-refundable financial resources.
During his many years of work on a large number of very complex development programs and projects, he published and presented at international conferences more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific and professional papers in the field of transport and port systems, goods and transport centers and terminals, internal transport and warehousing, and the design and application of modern information and econometric models and systems in the function of modern transport technology (EDIFACT).
At the same time, he was a member of scientific and professional societies and an active organizer and participant in numerous scientific and professional discussions in the field of transport, economic strategy and maritime systems.
Here are comments Dr. Miloš made for a facebook post back in 2014
Today, around 700,000 TEU containers are transported annually via the northern Adriatic ports to the countries of Central Europe, which is less than 50% of their actual demand. This means that the Adriatic ports are no longer classic competitors but should become strategic partners modeled after the “ARA” association (Amsterdam-Rotterdam-Antwerp), because all together they cannot satisfy the customers of their services.
By using the port of Rijeka as a global intermodal hub, the journey of parent ships between Asia and the countries of Central Europe is shortened by as much as 14 days compared to their current movement via the ports of the North Sea, which results in cost savings of at least 35% per ship’s journey or almost 40% in the total logistics costs of the countries of Central and part of Eastern and Western Europe.
The current railway line from the Port of Rijeka to Zagreb can accommodate a maximum of 850 t of trains and achieves a commercial speed of 40 km/h, so it only participates in freight transport with 12%, while the new railway line will have a commercial speed of 150 km/h and a minimum of 3,000 t of trains. With an estimated traffic demand or secure market of around 4.5 million TEU (around 50 million tons of cargo) per year and a share in port traffic of at least 85%, this railway line ensures a fixed annual GDP growth of around 4-6% and the creation of around 150,000 new jobs.
Back in the days of Yugoslavia, the Port of Rijeka purchased 2.5 million m2 of land in the Matulji municipality with the aim of developing a large intermodal hub that would functionally integrate the ports of the northern Adriatic with the lowland railway to Budapest and Vienna and with the countries of Central Europe. This is how the large project of the intermodal hub “Miklavlje” was created, which immediately pointed out the need to design and build a network of intermodal hubs from Rijeka to the Hungarian border, along the railway and along the inland waterways where the following have been designed so far: the Business Center “Karlovac” and “Rugvica”, the “Cargocenter Zagreb”, the Free Zone “Varaždin”, the goods transport centers “Sisak”, “Slavonski Brod”, “Osijek” and “Vukovar”, and the multi-purpose canal Vukovar-Šamac with a transversal to the Port of Ploče has also been designed.
The large intermodal hub “Rugvica” must be connected to the waterway (canal) to Sisak, and thus to the multipurpose Danube-Sava canal, because without it, it is impossible to install a modern intermodal transport system that is currently choking the entire EU. That this is so is also shown by new EU projects such as the SETA project, which focuses on the construction of intermodal hubs on transport corridors and their integration into the function of the “3E” objective, and in the development of which experts from the Republic of Croatia are necessarily involved. The key link in this chain is the multipurpose Vukovar-Šamac waterway, designed by the Romans, because it shortens the route from Rijeka to Vienna and Budapest by 411 km, irrigates the golden fields of Slavonia, contains as many as three hydroelectric power plants with its locks (sluices), turns the ports of Vienna, Budapest and Enns into feeder ports (auxiliary ports) of the port of Rijeka and draws the Port of Ploče into a large system of European intermodal hubs.
Goods in international public transport require finishing, industrial production, processing, refining, assembling, commissioning, etc., which represent economic multipliers or value-added services that today amount to around 11. This practically means that for every euro of revenue of the Port of Rijeka, all other participants in the transport and industrial system earn another 11 euros, which represents a social profitability rate of as much as 1,100%, which not even multinational companies can achieve. To achieve this great Croatian goal, it is necessary to design a logistics and industrial system for goods on the transport route, which contains a large number of entrepreneurial facilities in which these logistics services will be provided, and which constitute an input for the development of the overall economic system of the Republic of Croatia for a known and secure market. In this regard, local self-government units should play a particularly important role through their spatial development plans, to which we offer a free service. This design is being handled by the international SETA project, which is currently being developed.
It will not be a big secret to say that this represents the greatest strategic resource with which the Government of the Republic of Croatia can enter the global strategic-partner market where it will select strategic partners for the development of these large projects. Namely, the Republic of Croatia cannot and should not enter into the implementation of these strategic projects alone, because it can no longer borrow abroad, as it did for the construction of beautiful, but absolutely unproductive highways that cannot provide investment funds for the construction of these corridors, but the opposite would be quite certain. Therefore, the Government of the Republic of Croatia should prepare at least six international tenders and through them, through concessions, obtain already known large investors – strategic partners who, even without an official international tender, have submitted their bids. We offered the Government free services for the preparation and implementation of this concept, but the Government rejected this.
With the construction of the Rijeka-Zagreb-Botovo lowland railway and the Vukovar-Šamac multipurpose canal, the Croatian coast will be connected to a large source of year-round tourism, so that tourists will be transported in specially equipped wagons that will move at speeds exceeding 200 km/h to the sea, and the irrigated Slavonian fields will produce ecologically and biologically fantastic food that will be stored in refrigerated and air-conditioned spaces that will supply energy to ecologically clean and economically highly profitable hydroelectric power plants on the canal in question.
Now imagine if Dr. Miloš was Minister for a term or two where we would be. He would have put the Rijeka-Zagreb-Botovo railway line as the top priority project as it was the backbone of his transportation vision. That should have been finished by now.
Unfortunately Dr. Miloš died 25 March 2021, however, his projects didn’t die with him.
If you have read this far then you know he said we need to prepare international tenders. Now if the dijaspora was smart and had a global pension fund then they could grab the best parts of his projects and fund them themselves.
Maybe you think these things are a bit hyped? In the next post I will show the evidence how big this REALLY is.
Leave a Reply