Eastern Europe: Transport Impacts of Political Revolution

Abstract

The countries of Central and Eastern Europe have been undergoing profound political, social, and economic changes over the past five years. The overthrow of Communist dictatorships throughout the region from 1989 to 1991 unleashed a series of revolutions, affecting virtually every aspect of life. Among former Socialist countries, East Germany (the German Democratic Republic) experienced the most sudden transformation, thanks to its reunification with West Germany in 1990. The developments in East Germany will be discussed in this chapter because East Germany was an integral part of the political and economic system in Eastern Europe until 1989. Moreover, the situation there is useful for predicting future developments in other former Eastern Bloc countries. The rest of the chapter focuses on Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia (since 1993, this has split to become the Czech Republic and Slovakia). Of course, political and economic changes in Bulgaria, Romania, the former Yugoslavia and the former Soviet Union have been at least as important, but impacts on urban transport there have not yet been as large, and data for those countries are less available and less reliable than for the countries included in this chapter.