For the development of the passenger railway transport system at European level and for breaking limits regarding ticket booking for abroad travels, the Transport Commission has adopted the regulation on travel planning and booking for EU territory. Therefore, the operators will have to provide information on train types, train stop period and location, availability of seats on categories, price structures etc. The regulation stipulates that the operators should elaborate the information related to available schedules, as well as price information agreed upon by partners.
The 2014-2020 period aims, especially at the European Union level, to interconnect member states, from the point of view of transport, energy and information technology. The European connection is a completely new scheme, meant for financing pan-European infrastructures, projects which will be financed by EUR 40 Billion and another EUR 10 Billion from the budget of the cohesion policy. All EU strategies, regulations and programmes lead to the same conclusion: a single market Europe.
Under the circumstances, as regards passenger railway transport, it will be essential for the operators to harmonise IT networks for ensuring single information.
What a single passenger railway transport at the European level needs is the implementation of projects for enabling pan-European travelling, by forcing the standardisation of dates, hours and prices. Therefore, the Transport Commission has adopted the new regulation (May 2011) for travel and ticket planning, the key for the booking and information regarding the ticketing system being the interoperability, the information being exchanged between the railway companies and between the travel ticket suppliers. “If we are serious about getting people onto rail, and particularly about having rail compete with air travel over middle distances then we need to offer rail passengers the seamless planning and ticketing offers that match the airlines. We want to make it as easy, in the future, to book a rail ticket from Barcelona to Brussels or Berlin to Bratislava as it is to book a corresponding flight. Making common timetabling and fare information available to operators is a significant first step, but it is just the start of a much bigger push to make pan European rail planning and ticketing a reality.”, said Vice President Siim Kallas, the commissioner responsible for Transports.
For 2012, the Commission will put forward a legal complementary regulation requesting the operators to align their IT systems so that standardised data should be transferred between European operators. These measures will be the basis for the technical foundations in order to allow the new generation of travel planning systems and ticketing systems to make their launch on the railway transport market.
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