International passenger transport services are modest compared to the internal service market. On longer distances, for example journeys of over 500 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 agglomerations 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, several 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”, declared Vicenc Pedret – Cusco, Economic Advisor, DG MOVE, while attending the conference “Railway passenger transport on the sustainable mobility agenda”, organised by Club Feroviar and the Romanian Railway Industry Association (AIF) in Sibiu in March 2012.
The cross-border high-speed traffic between the 27 EU member states has increased by 48%, cross-border regional services have increased by 36% to be level of 2009, while conventional long-distance services 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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