Although the proposal for a directive for the recast of the First Railway Package and the set up of a Single European Railway Area stipulates, among others, the increasing competition on the rail market by establishing more transparent conditions on the railway infrastructure access (in specific conditions even the guarantee of the access is required), new rules on infrastructure financing for encouraging investments, including a demand addressed to member states for drawing up national long-term strategies and negotiating multi-annual contracts with infrastructure managers, has not managed to satisfy and fully persuade the European railway sector to eliminate the incongruities of certain provisions of the railway legislation.
“No notable progress was made towards consolidating the Single European Railway Area. CER is now focusing all hopes towards the European Parliament which seems to have a positive attitude and much more ambitious”, declared Johannes Ludewig, Executive Director of the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER). Currently, the railway sector hopes for the best from the European Parliament whose vote on the recast is sche
duled for the beginning of September. Also, the current reform approaches those segments of the legislation which should be renegotiated if the legal separation of the transport operators would be approached afterwards. Time could be thus spared as well as resources if the Parliament, as co-legislator, decided to take measures and introduce the necessary changes.
A negative “vote” was also given by the European Economic and Social Committee (CESE) which although supports the decisions of the European Commission to reform the First Railway Package, manifests a certain reserve towards the provisions which go beyond the framework of the respective objective or are insufficient.
Therefore, the Economic Committee regrets the fact that the draft directive deals neither with interoperability (although the development of the Single European Railway Area depends a lot on the progress with technical interoperability) nor with the unbalance in the railway traffic management which frequently prioritises passenger trains to the detriment of freight trains.
In a time of serious budget constraints, we will have to find new resources for financing railway infrastructure. Given the fact that most financing granted by the EU through structural and cohesion funds are mainly directed towards road infrastructure, while TEN-T funds are mainly dedicated to the railway sector, the Economic Committee can agree with a potential establishment of a single transport fund only if it is neutral and balanced as related to all transport modes. The Committee proposes to explicitly include this financing in the recast of the cohesion policy for the period after 2014.
However, the Economic Committee stresses the delays in setting up the conditions that would permit a fair competition between the rail sector and the other means of transport and the insufficient measures that follow the internalization of costs and the external effects of the transport by charging external costs that are still covered by the company.
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