A topic I will resume this month is that of the way in which public authorities get involved in the railway infrastructure maintenance activity. The core of the entire European railway reform consists in financially separating railway undertakings, which means eliminating disguised subsidies, ensuring financial transparency and creating the premises of a competitive area. A praiseworthy action which proved quite lame in thinking the drives which could substitute these disguised subsidies. But in the pursuit of transparency and efficiency, the only instruments which came to mind were track access charging next to a series of other commercial sources which finally transform this track access charge in an unbalanced and non-transparent formula from one network to another.
This innocent approach, through which only direct users pay (compared to the other surface transport mode), has made railways stand to the edge of a precipice, especially in the countries with limited financial resources. Lacking a financial engineering, due to the lack of funds or imagination, railway networks in the new member states survive only based on the technical stoicism of the exploitation teams and because there are still operators condemned to hold the line. Surviving is the right word because the increasing number of areas and elements pending in maintenance works impose the introduction of new speed restrictions weakening the attractiveness of rail transport and resulting in the shift of goods and passengers to other more polluting and congestion-generating transport modes, dropping the financial resources that the system can generate for itself. The consequence is a financial-political pressure sustaining the shut down of services on some lines and the destruction of the railway activity fundamentals.
The lack of implication of “non-users” in financing maintenance activities and the redirection of all the society’s financial resources to other economic sectors put a greater pressure on railway carriers which are being repeatedly sabotaged: the track access charge is several times higher than road tolls, the speed is permanently dropping on a degraded network (the percentage of new or refurbished lines is insignificant compared to the number of km of highways and roads built or modernised), the financial sources of the system are also dried by the fuel and energy taxes which are redirected, via the central budget, to roads and not to the rail infrastructure.
If we want to meet the objectives of the White Paper on Transport, it is necessary to pay special attention to the way in which the society pays its debt and to this mode of transport. Activity contracts between infrastructure managers and public authorities have to refer to significant amounts and to realistic objectives to meet the right technical parameters.
In the lack of an appropriate infrastructure, the least polluting mode of transport has to retreat to the graveyard (the train doesn’t run on dirt or gravel roads, it cannot be parked near a pedestrian way between flats and doesn’t accelerate to 100 km/h in less than 10 seconds either).
by Ştefan Roşeanu
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