This text comes with a plea sudmitted first of all to the Romanian Government, the European Commission and secondly to the governments of the other new EU Member States: let’s just stop tormenting so much and close down railways for good! Such a decision applied with small steps for the past 25 years can cause nothing but pain, while its abrupt implementation would end the torment!
Why keeping a network which doesn’t have the parameters of the Rotterdam-Genoa Corridor? Why simply comparing performance inside the country when we could also look around Europe and compare? For Romania, an important American consultancy company, with a team of British experts, has reached the conclusion that 93% of the freight and passengers are carried on 54% of the network, so we might simply close the remainder 46%. But it’s a pity to have such an approach. Looking to the whole European network, we will see that only a small fraction of European volumes is carried in Romania, Bulgaria and Greece. So why still keeping these networks open and invest in attracting new traffic and increasing the life standards of people living in the area?
The closure decision will be very beneficial for the national and European budget. It will no longer be necessary to overcharge railway transport to have money to invest in roads. The money could be moved directly. It will no longer be a problem that the 50%-50% investment report in roads and railways is never observed, because nothing divides by zero.
Why should we only charge the fuel consumed by trains, when we could have no passenger train to compensate? Every year in Romania alone around EUR 400 Million is spent on the railway passenger public services obligations. Plus the money spent on pretending to maintain the infrastructure, plus the funds for the reconstruction of railways. How many kilometres of highways could be built and how much the fuel tax could then be reduced…
The benefits of shutting down the railways would be incommensurable: millions of tonnes of scrap iron, copper and other materials to sell, tens of thousands hectares to be turned into account or into highways, plants and ports that could sell their own railway networks and cease looking for money to upgrade them, cows no longer scared by trains passing by etc.
Why troubling ourselves each and every time we make feasibility studies only to prove that a line between two minor cities taken out of context on a 3,000 km corridor is not feasible, and then, redirect the money to roads? Let’s just close down the railways and we’re done! Why bother looking for new operators to bring additional trains when we could focus on trucks and minibuses? We don’t even have to explain that the railway network and business are dying because for the past 25 years we have been taking everything from them and now they simply cannot keep up.
The benefits for our economy and quality of life are even more to count: people can turn to private cars and gain freedom of mobility as they will no longer be captive to the public transport system. We shall see millions of new cars crowding on our highways and the investments in public roads will yell a high cost-benefit ratio. Does not matter the millions of tonnes of green house gases and the time lost in congestion. Does not matter if millions of European citizens can not afford or do not want a private car. We shall see new thousands of trucks on our European networks, and so the economy will start revolving. Does not matter if ports and manufacturing plants will be blocked by the long queues because of lack of capacity. Does not matter how much we have to spend for land acquisitions to build the new highways – this is money that go to the public. Does not matter how may casualties we count on road networks they are just collateral victims to our grandiose development.
There are still many administrative and financial advantages, but let’s just stop here, not before renewing my plea to close down the railways!
by Ştefan Roşeanu
Share on:
