Netherlands and Germany have Europe’s best transport EU scoreboard finds best transport performance in northern Europe.

The European Commission has published for the first time a scoreboard on transport infrastructure ranking the EU’s 28 member states. It finds a wide deviation between countries.

The Netherlands and Germany top the scoreboard with high scores in 11 categories, followed by Sweden, the UK and Denmark.

Poland, Bulgaria, Greece, Latvia, and Romania rank at the bottom of the table.

The Commission used data from Eurostat, the European Environment Agency, the World Bank and the OECD to come up with the scores. The online tool can be broken down my mode of transport (road, rail, waterborne, air) or by categories including infrastructure, adherence with EU law, logistics, access to market, and environmental impact.

Siim Kallas, the European commissioner for transport, acknowledged that the scoreboard “can only offer a snapshot.” But he said it will give the Commission and member states “a point of reference and a source of inspiration for our work together".

Yesterday the Commission launched an online tool for consumers to determine which airlines are banned from operating in the EU because of a poor safety record.

Users can type in a country, an airline name, or an ICAO airline code and see whether or not the airline is on the ‘EU Air Safety List’. Previously, even though the Commission's EU Air Safety List website is one of the most visited websites in the transport policy area, users had to study the complete list of airlines in order to find the information they needed on one particular airline.