Turin: Workers have been boring the base tunnel under the Alps since long before the European Union promised to finish its core transport network by 2030. They will still be at it when that deadline passes. The European Court of Auditors examined eight transport megaprojects and concluded that the target will be missed, and the Official Journal carried the report’s summary on 3 September, days before transport ministers gather informally on 20 and 21 September.

The numbers are unforgiving. The eight projects span thirteen countries and have drawn €15.3 billion in EU funding. Their combined real cost now exceeds the original estimates by 82 per cent, against 47 per cent when the auditors last examined the same portfolio in 2020. Five of the projects run an average of seventeen years late, up from eleven years six years ago. Delay and cost are compounding rather than stabilising, which is the finding that should worry finance ministries.

Rail Baltica supplies the extreme case. The standard-gauge line meant to connect the Baltic states to the Polish network has seen costs rise 160 per cent in six years, reaching €23.06 billion for the first phase alone. That single phase now costs almost four times what planners once budgeted for the entire project. The Lyon to Turin line and its base tunnel look restrained by comparison, with a 23 per cent increase since 2020, but the schedule tells the fuller story. Trains were supposed to run in 2015. The 2020 review moved the date to 2030. The current target is 2033, and the auditors treat even that with caution.

Explaining the overruns requires no conspiracy. Megaprojects cross borders, and each border adds a permitting regime, a procurement culture and an electorate. Geology surprises engineers. Construction-material inflation outran general inflation for most of this decade. Every one of these factors was foreseeable, and the original estimates accounted for almost none of them.

The auditors’ sharper point concerns incentives. Promoters submit optimistic figures because optimistic figures win approval, and once construction starts no government will abandon a half-dug tunnel. Sunk cost then does the persuading. The Commission co-finances through the Connecting Europe Facility but does not build, and its leverage over national promoters weakens once the money starts flowing. Coverage of the report noted that this structural gap has been flagged before without producing much change.

The practical consequence lands on the next budget. If the core network cannot be finished by 2030, either the deadline moves or the network shrinks, and both options carry political costs that no capital wants to absorb. The informal transport council later this month offers the first chance to say so out loud.

Ministers rarely take that chance. The safer course is to reaffirm the target, fund the next tranche and let the arithmetic collect somewhere else. The auditors have now made that harder by writing the arithmetic down.