The matter is "a true priority" for the European Union, said European Transportation Commissioner Jacques Barrot on a visit Thursday and Friday to the site where Austrian and Italian officials want to build a 52-kilometre (35-mile) railroad tunnel underneath the Brenner Pass.

Truck traffic through the pass increased 15.2 percent in 2004 to over two million vehicles, or more than a third of total traffic though all the Alps.

In 1991, only 900,000 trucks had used the Brenner Pass, according to road statistics.

Situated between the Austrian and Italian Alps, on the busy axis between northern Italian metropolis Milan and southern Germany's largest city, Munich, the pass is often jammed with traffic, causing pollution that drifts down into valleys.

The situation worsened when on January 1, 2004 traffic quotas that had been negotiated in 1991 between Austria and the EU to limit the number of 40-ton trucks using pass to an annual 1.6 million expired.

"Since then, nothing stops millions of trucks from driving through the Brenner Pass, the lowest (1,400 meters), the most accessible and above all the least expensive of the Alpine passes," Fritz Gurgieser from the Transitforum association of residents and local officials told AFP.

Austria is in competition with Switzerland as a transit site and is suffering "the impact of road traffic that is avoiding Switzerland, which can impose high tolls since it is not a member of the EU," Austrian Transport Minister Hubert Gorbach said.

Austria has been reprimanded twice by the European Court of Justice for having tried to limit traffic by setting tolls 60 percent above the European norm.

But Austria is hoping that European regulations in this domain will be relaxed.

Barrot said he would "get personally involved" in the European council of transport ministers that is to meet April 21 to push for Austria to be allowed to have higher tolls.

He also said he would make it a priority to support the Austrian-Italian project to build a railroad tunnel though the Brenner Pass by 2015, a project expected to cost nine billion euros (11.7 billion dollars) with the EU footing up to 20 percent of the bill.

But defenders of the Brenner Pass think Barrot will be unable to help the railroad tunnel project.

"There already is a train line. It is not used enough and has seen its market share drop five percent since the end of quotas on road traffic," said Gurgieser, who added that the tunnel idea is one of the most expensive transportation projects in Europe.

Herwig van Staa, governor of Austria's Tyrol province where the Brenner Pass is located, said that only "a tax on traffic through all the passes in the Alps and bans on certain transit sectors" will be able to cut down on traffic.

In 2004, Switzerland registered 1.225 million truck transits through all of its mountain passes, 10 percent fewer than in 2000, as high tolls and bans on certain transit sectors had an effect.

The toll for a 40-ton truck driving through the Brenner Pass is 69 euros, half that charged for travel through a Swiss mountain pass.

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