On Thursday 16 June, MEPs on the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport debated the draft report by Annalisa Tardino (Identity and Democracy, Italy) on the action plan to promote long-distance and cross-border passenger rail transport.
“We need to make rail transport more attractive to citizens. Rail transport must be interoperable, in particular through the issue of multimodal ticketing (see EUROPE 12972/16). We must protect the rights of passengers and take into account the more remote, isolated, less populated regions”, said Ms Tardino, stressing that the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) needs to play a central role.
From the other parliamentary groups, some MEPs, such as Andris Ameriks (S&D, Latvia), insisted on including the promotion of the railway sector in the digital transition, without forgetting to work on the ‘cyber security’ aspect of the sector. In addition, he stressed, work will also have to be done on making rail transport more accessible and the issue of financing will have to be raised.
“If we are seeing a decline in rail transport, it is not because trains are not working, but because low-cost aviation has arrived. We need to make aviation pay to put money back into rail and ensure equal treatment between modes of transport”, said Jakop Dalunde (Greens/EFA, Sweden).
In addition, Mr Dalunde said, besides working on the missing links in the TEN-T and the remaining bottlenecks, the priority will also be to address the regulatory issue.
“Even if we make rail transport cheaper, it is still difficult to make journeys across several countries by train. Many operators refuse to sell tickets to third party operators so that users can have a full journey”, he added.
Other MEPs, such as Ondřej Kovařík (Renew Europe, Czech Republic), also called for encouraging the introduction of high-speed trains - “when the speed of a journey remains a determining factor in the choice of users” - and reviving night trains.
Finally, on the EPP side, Karolin Braunsberger-Reinhold (Germany) also called for a comprehensive review of the railway sector to promote “equal conditions of competition between the private and public sectors”. “We need to have fair incentives, true multi-modal ticketing, via a holistic approach”, she concluded. (Original version in French by Thomas Mangin)