Among consumers, rail services are ranked 27th out of 30 services markets, with particularly poor scores on comparability and satisfaction. The market records the second highest number of problems with a wide divergence existing across the EU. In most EU Member States, public payments have increased substantially, while the growth in passenger-kilometres has been more moderate. Overall passenger-kilometres increased by 4.3% between 2005 and 2010. Substantial public sector investment, particularly in the newer EU member states where subsidy payments more than doubled in six years, has not in itself secured equivalent increases in rail demand. This is partly due to an inability to curb operational inefficiencies caused by a lack of appropriate competitive incentives. Yet in some member states, public funding is awarded directly without competitive tender. Efficiency gains are desperately needed to create sustainable growth and for the benefit of the public budget.
International passenger transport ser-vices are modest compared to the internal service market. On longer distances, for example journeys of over 400 km, railways have a relatively small market share. For such journeys, personal vehicles and planes have conquered the greatest part of the market. On short, regional distances, the highest demand refers to suburban railway transport services within the agglo-
merations of a country; therefore the international railway transport volume is modest.
On the state budgeted railway market (for which there are public service contracts), the implication of several authorities complicate the organisation of international transport services. There are, however, se-veral successful examples of international regional lines operated under public service contracts.
But there are many technical hindrances in the operation of international transport services, hindrances that could only be overcome through additional costs. Since international passenger transport can only cover a small part of the overall railway transport services, technical standardisation is only possible to a limited extent, the recently launched study specifies. More-over, the non-comprehensive implementation of the existing EU legislation continues to be a barrier in the development of cross-border services for passenger transport.
The lack of strong and independent regulatory bodies that could intervene in case of litigation is also considered a hindrance. High charges for railway infrastructure access can also be an obstacle, especially on new high-speed lines.
The old transport challenges remained unchanged as new ones appeared, such as increasing competitiveness which represents a pressure in the global economy, traffic congestion and poor accessibility in the transport market, the increasing oil price and the oil dependency in the transport sector, all these representing hindrances in setting an environmentally friendly transport.
The cross-border high-speed traffic between the 27 EU member states (prior to Croatia’s accession to the EU) has increased by 48%, cross-border regional services have increased by 36%, by 2009 and then they’ve dropped, just like conventional long-distance services which have dropped by 32%. At the same time, a 91% increase in the number of regional trains has been recorded between EU15 and EU 12. Borders between EU15 countries cover nearly 85% of the traffic flow, where growth is based on high-speed railway traffic development between France and different other countries, but also on higher traffic between Sweden and Denmark. In other EU15 countries railway traffic was below 10%.
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