Sometimes I wonder what the role of the state is in relation to the society and economy. The approach on public policies in the field of rail transport infrastructures entitles us to believe that the group of individuals who make up the “state” (meaning the mechanism which governs a certain administrative-territorial structure) trade the “public well-being” and the policies for general development, for certain capitalist concepts which apply mostly to the economic landscape, and not the political background, concepts such as “profit” and “loss”. At the crossroads between the year 2010 and 2011, marked by a new version of the “White Paper on Transport” and the recast of the First Railway Package, are we entitled to wonder “what should be the actual role of the infrastructure manager”? and “what should be the role of the track access charge”? The institutional separation of railway companies, which also generated the birth of rail infrastructure managers, had as fundamental elements the financial transparency of revenues and expenses in every segment (including infrastructure management) and profit maximization for every activity. The companies which manage rail infrastructures (in an overwhelming proportion even the property of public central authorities) were faced with the need to relate their investment and maintenance decisions to the traffic volumes and, implicitly, the profits generated on a certain section. This way, investing in the highly polluting surface transport infrastructure became a false race for revenues, the state and EU institutions being led to ignore (at least in the official documents which motivate a certain investment) the strategic argument (the radical development of the society and economy in the respective investment area) to the detriment of the more adventurous arguments (direct revenues generated from rail transport). In the context of territorial cohesion policies and improvement in the standard of living of certain EU communities, the role of rail transport as a catalyst is, therefore, ignored (in the context of a reduced traffic potential). This brings me to my second question, concerning the role of the track access charge. Is it just to act as a barometer and an argument in favour of eliminating certain routes considered “unprofitable”? Maintaining current policies could lead either to the isolation of certain industrial or logistics centres caused by the insufficient taxes raised through the infrastructure access charge or the complete discouragement of rail traffic (and implicitly the same isolation) caused by the increase in taxes. A revision of the TUI strategy at national and European level would allow infrastructure managers to allocate resources for areas that need support in order to develop and not to contribute to the impairment of an entire community.
by Ştefan Roşeanu
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