Reading Transportation Policy in Ukraine

Transportation policy is a kind of activity of the corresponding state branchy institutions that provide all the branches of economy and population of the country with shipments. Nowadays strategic direction of the transportation policy is the integration of Ukraine into European and world transportation systems and finding solution to the problem of renovation and modernization of capital assets. This integration is of the great importance because Ukraine is involved in exploitation of transportation technologies and its transportation infrastructure is used to ship in freights transit. Major transit tracks sometimes might cause fierce competition among the countries the tracks run through. This fact defines the role of the states in world transportation system. The basic points of the transportation policy of Ukraine were formed within the "State Program of Activity and Development for the period from 2000 to 2004". The program highlights basic tasks, long-term goals and priorities in developing this branch of industry. To guarantee the availability of passenger transfers to the population, rail facilities try to compensate around 1 billion annual losses from these transfers at the expense of incomes from freight shipments. With this in mind, "Ukrzaliznyts'a" utilises the strict system of norm expenditure planning. To decrease unreasonable costs for organization departments, cost-accounting indexes were erased and the actions towards using resource-saving steps were taken.

At the expense of decreasing the number of staff, reorganization of 24 inoperative locomotive and carriage depots, closing of 159 railway stations and other actions the costs of transportation were decreased for more than 1,2 billion hrn. However, it may cover only exploitation and repairing costs of rail facilities.

Participation of the national Navy in foreign trade relations of Ukraine is cut because of the complicated social-economic conditions e.g. slowdown in business, production and investment activity. Ships are often discarded that leads to the cut in the Navy.

Basic factors to determine current state of the airlines are: decrease in the population's standard of living which resulted in decrease in purchase power and moral and physical depreciation of the aircraft that causes competitive disability in the foreign market of airlines.

The main problem of passenger auto transfers is the difficulty to cover the losses of the profit obtained from fringe benefits and tariffs control that leads to unsatisfactory financial state of enterprises. The availability of auto tracks and their technical state do not meet the demands of national economy.

Common problems of all kinds of transport in Ukraine are:

morally and physically outdated transportation facilities, their low competitive ability in the foreign and domestic market;

absence of national and foreign investments to update trans­portation structure through few favorable projects;

imperfection of normative-juridical provision for the transporta­tion system to function, inefficient decision - making concerning unification of transportation legislation in accordance with the international law;

unsatisfactory financial state of transportation enterprises being under the burden of purchasing crisis and necessity to repay preferential passenger transfers.