Meeting at the initiative of the Portuguese Presidency of the Council of the European Union on Tuesday 30 March to discuss the way forward for the development of rail transport in the coming years (see EUROPE 12688/8), the European Transport Ministers addressed in particular the issue of transferring European freight from road to rail.
This operation is presented as one of the ways to meet the EU’s climate commitments. The European Commission has indeed called in its European Green Deal for “a substantial part of the 75% of inland freight transported today by road to be transferred to rail and inland waterways”. In its Sustainable Mobility Strategy (see EUROPE 12619/12), it calls for “urgent action given the limited progress made to date”.
The modal share of rail in land freight fell to 17.9% in 2018, down from 18.3% in 2011.
In a joint declaration, presented by France on Tuesday and supported by 15 other countries—Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Greece, Ireland, Italy, Latvia, Lithuania, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Romania and Slovakia—the modal shift solution was rightly endorsed by citizens.
The 16 signatory States ask the Commission, among other things, to rapidly launch a study on the percentage of modal shift that can be achieved by taking into account the current capacity of the European rail network or on the percentage of modal shift that can be achieved by introducing a European financial mechanism to cover the additional externalities of rail freight compared to road.
Modernising the sector
However, this modal shift will have to go hand in hand with a modernisation of rail transport, particularly of goods.
“Much remains to be done in the years to come”, the 16 ministers who signed the declaration acknowledge, arguing in particular that progress will be needed on digitalisation, automation, interoperability and the introduction of more sustainable rolling stock.
The need to invest much more “in rail infrastructure, in the trains themselves, in interoperability and digitalisation” was also reiterated by many speakers at the meeting.
“Most ministers recognised that we have important gaps and that we have set the bar high in terms of the objective”, Portuguese Infrastructure Minister Pedro Nuno Santos summed up at a press conference.
In an assessment of European rail policy over the past 25 years, published on Tuesday at the request of the Portuguese Presidency, the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC) listed a number of measures that it believes would benefit the development of rail freight. In particular, the Committee advocates the relaunch of a European single wagon load system, the linking of strategic infrastructures, such as ports, to rail infrastructures, and the participation of large logistics companies in a modal reorientation of their flows.
For the Member States’ declaration: https://bit.ly/31wrFyH (Original version in French by Agathe Cherki)