Op-ed from Schiller Institute chairman Tom Gillesberg in Jyllands-Posten July 30, 2007

Copenhagen July 30, 2007 – Under the title, "Bridges are the foundation for the next 50 years infrastructure," Tom Gillesberg, the chairman of the Schiller Institute (SI) in Denmark, calls for a visionary 50-year perspective in an Op-ed in Jyllands-POosten, the the biggest Danish daily, today. As stated in the highlighted quote accompanying the Op-ed, "The task which the Infrastructure Commission and the Danish politicians are faced with is to decide the overall visionary plan which can lay the basis for the development in the next 50 years. A foundation which can be completed piece after piece, and built upon." The Infrastructure Commission is to issue their recommendations for the major infrastructure projects to be build over the next 30 years during the next few months. This is the second recent Op-ed JP has printed by Gillesberg, the first being prominently published on June 21.

Gillesberg’s Op-ed continues, under the sub-head "Maglev," "Therefore, it is important to choose the right foundation. In a little more than 10 years, it ought to be so that the Great Belt Bridge and the Oeresunds Bridge [both now in use] have been supplemented by a series of new bridges: the Kattegat connection [which the SI has been championing], the Fehmarn Bridge [over the Baltic Sea to Germany] and a bridge between Helsingoer [in Denmark, the Danish name for Shakespeare’s Elsinor, where Hamlet takes place] and Helsingborg [in Sweden]."

Gillesberg’s Op-ed reiterates the SI call for the Kattegat link to be built with a maglev, which would allow the travel time between the Danish capital of Copenhagen and Aarhus, Denmark’s second largest city, to be 25 minutes. Thereafter, maglev will be extended both nationally and internationally, and will also play a growing role in freight transport. We will be the first with the new, rather than the last with the old.

Gillesberg also argues that significant amounts need to be spent on the rail infrastructure, which has been neglected, and we should not be frightened by the thought that the Danish infrastructure budget needs to be tripled during the next two decades. Such an investment will, as the result in increased productivity and creation of wealth, come back with compound interest.

The Op-ed ends by stating that "other infrastructure projects should fit in to this larger plan, with the Kattegat/maglev project as the rotation point for the next 50 years, and therefore the starting point for the work the Infrastructure Commission and Danish Parliament take up after the summer.

Link to the article in Danish

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