On 18 April 2011, Siim Kallas, Vice-President of the EC in charge of Transport, and Pat Cox, European Coordinator in charge of the Priority Project No. 1 "Railway axis Berlin-Verona/Milano-Bologna-Naples-Messina-Palermo", attended a ceremony in Innsbruck to launch the works on the Brenner Base Tunnel. The Brenner Base Tunnel is a low-gradient rail tunnel with two parallel tubes between Innsbruck (Austria) and Fortezza (Italy). The cross-border tunnel will remove a major bottleneck for both freight and passenger transit between Austria and Italy. Vice-President Kallas welcomed the decision taken by Austria and Italy to start the tunnelling works as an important step towards more resource-efficient and sustainable transport in the sensitive alpine region.