Rebuilding railway networks remains the main challenge for the development of the railway transport in the Wider Black Sea Area. For efficiently developing TEN-T networks and ensuring a positive transport in the Wider Black Sea Area, the European Rail Industry Association (UNIFE) underlines the necessity to grant a sufficient EU funds allocation to transport infrastructure. Railway infrastructure financing was one of the topics debated during the Railway Days 2011 Summit.
The funds necessary for the deve-lopment of the TEN-T network by 2020 are EUR 500 Billion. UNIFE believes that the allocation of infrastructure funds through the Cohesion Policy should at least be maintained at current levels (EUR 82 Billion for transport) in the next programming period (2014-2020), while the proposal of the European Commission to create the Connecting European Facility, that would benefit from EUR 31.7 Billion funds, should be supported by member states. It is important to mention that in the previous financial period, 2007-2013, only EUR 23.6 Billion of the EUR 82 Billion finance railway projects, while the remaining EUR 41 Billion are dedicated to road transport.
“This tendency needs to be reversed in the next programming period so as to match the objectives of the White Paper on Transport and those of the Europe 2020 strategy. In the current programming period, member states are free to decide on the EU co-financing rate applicable to each mode and often set a lower EU co-financing rate for rail projects than for road projects. Consequently, for the next programming period, we propose that member states would no longer have this privilege, and no funds shifts from rail projects to road projects”, stressed Jérémie Pélerin, Senior Corporate and Public Affairs Manager, UNIFE.
UNIFE grants special attention to the track access charge. In the current programming period, all rail infrastructure projects, unlike most road infrastructure projects, are considered to be revenue generating.
Track access charges revenues in a period of 20 to 25 years are deducted from the eligible project expenditure. UNIFE suggests that in the next programming period, 2014-2020, the deduction of revenues of track access charges from eligible expenditure should be allowed only if similar provisions exist for road transport in the member states concerned. Otherwise, the rules enacted in the article 55 of the current general regulation (N°1083/2006) should be abolished.
If these are just few of UNIFE’s recommendations to the European Commission for supporting railway transport, the association believes that member states should also have clear obligations and provisions.
Therefore, it is necessary to elaborate a Master Plan that will prioritize sustainable transport. What would be the advantages? It would allow foreseeing the development of rail transport in the long term and it would reinforce the trust of the European Commission and the international financing institutions.
The requirements for the efficiency of a Master Plan include set clear priorities and a timeframe for the development and maintenance of the infrastructure, a realistic and mature project pipeline (including budgetary framework). It should also consider customers expectations and environmental issues. The State must be committed to the plan, for example to finance projects on schedule to deliver them. Therefore, UNIFE believes that the Master Plan should be the result of a political debate and should be endorsed by the Government and the Parliament. Apart from a coherent Master Plan, member states should establish efficient admi-nistrative structures dedicated to railway infrastructure investments, such as an agency exclusively dedicated to this purpose. The advantages of such a method include a quicker implementation of the rail projects identified in the Master Plan and a better absorption of EU funds. More-over, the agency would deliver a transpa-rent procurement and tendering process and effective project supervision.
For an efficient operation of the agency, it is necessary to impose requirements such as to offer the agency a clear mandate and its own budget. The agency should gather all needed competencies, from the planning and implementation of railway projects to EU funds management as well as business and commercial skills. More-over, the agency should hire qualified staff with competitive salaries and, most importantly, it should be sufficiently independent from the political power in order to keep it out of shifting political priorities.
The UNIFE representative made a short presentation of the situation of most transport networks in the Wider Black Sea Area (WBSA) and described it as “worrying”.
The poor infrastructure conditions ge-nerate speed restrictions for trains and this must be counteracted with modernisation works to modern standards and with eliminating the current traffic bottlenecks. Although infrastructure managers have to be efficient, the insufficient financing leaves them no possibility to maintain the existing network. The outcome of such a situation cannot be but the drop of passenger and freight traffic and the difficulty of railway transport to compete with the other modes of transport. The solution is simple: only the modernisation of railway networks and the sufficient financing of infrastructure managers can boost traffic and encourage modal shift.
“Member states and infrastructure ma-nagers need to cooperate as the latter of parties cannot exceed their problems by themselves”, stresses Pélerin.
Railway infrastructure networks in the Wider Black Sea Area (WBSA) have to be developed in a coordinating manner in order to fully take advantage of the inter-operability benefits.
“In turn, interoperability is a challenge for the Wider Black Sea Area (WBSA), so that the legislation of the European Union on interoperability such as the Technical Specifications for Interoperability (TSI) should be implemented in non-EU countries in order to avoid the discontinuity of networks. On the other hand, national rules should progressively disappear in order to be able to obtain a fully interoperable system, but investments in the ERTMS represent the way to ensure interoperabi-lity between national networks”, points out the UNIFE representatives.
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