More than 10 years ago, ambitious objectives have been set for rail freight competitiveness by the European Commission’s 2001 Transport White Paper. Numerous policy measures have been introduced over the last decade in an attempt to realise this vision, and a new Transport White Paper was adopted in 2011, with more ambitious objectives for an efficient and sustainable transport sector.
At the beginning of the year, the European Commission launched the Fourth Railway Package, a set of legislative measures aimed to “organise” the chaos in which the European railway transport lingers today. Have the measures adopted in the last decade been too few, or on the contrary, too many and too complicated to achieve interoperability in freight as well as passenger transport?
The Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies (CER) believes it is the right time to analyse the positive, as well as the negative parts and to evaluate the efficiency of these measures.
Therefore, CER has elaborated a report of what has happened in the freight transport sector over the past ten years. So what is the state of the rail freight sector after a decade of EU rail policy measures?
Unfortunately, it is not as good as one might hope, and overall progress in the competitiveness of rail freight compared with other modes is rather disappointing. In spite of a significant development in intra-modal competition over the past decade, the much-needed modal shift towards rail, which would bring energy efficiency and important CO2 emissions gains, is still far from being a reality. The imbalance between road and rail freight is increasing, in a worrying move for the sustainability of the transport system.
The European railway organisation believes that building on the lessons from the past decade, we need to collectively look at what needs to be done to turn the objectives of the 2011 Transport White Paper into reality. The report elaborated by CER aims to do just this, by providing a snapshot of the situation of rail freight and assessing the efficiency of policy measures already introduced. Most importantly, it provides concrete recommendations in order to fully realise the potential of rail freight.
Thus, the report deals with major importance topics such as the impact of railway transport on the environment, external costs, the legislative framework, interoperability, phonic pollution, the quality of infrastructure and its effects on the competitiveness of freight transport, market evolutions of the different segments which compose railway freight transport, liberalisation, the harmonisation of the Eurasian Platform legislation – the CIM-SMGS consignment note, multimodality or the stage of the e-Rail Freight project.
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