Earlier this year, the European Parliament voted in favour of legislation to amend and enhance the bloc’s management of railway infrastructure capacity.
Driven in part by the political and societal impetus to better promote rail as a sustainable form of freight transportation, the Single European Railway Area: Use of Railway Infrastructure Capacity legislation aims to solve efficiency and reliability issues and boost competitiveness by rethinking capacity use, improving cross-border continuity and mandating maintenance funding.
The legislation includes welcome developments for those advocating for greater transparency and collaboration in EU rail. It also includes a host of different measures, such as the planned creation of a digital management system, a performance evaluation body and the ambitiously titled European Rail Platform. But will it be enough to resolve long-standing issues?
Off track – the current state of EU rail
To understand this regulation, it's important to consider the factors that inspired it in the first place. To date, a lack of customer focus and fragmentation have hindered initiatives to expand and enhance the EU’s rail freight network.
Currently, managing rail freight is a delicate balance between EU-wide regulations designed to create a unified market, and national-level infrastructure and operational management. Individual member states substantially influence rail networks through their investment decisions, strategic plans and infrastructure development priorities.
At the same time, domestic market forces can shape how countries use their networks and invest in expansion.
The EU still lacks a universal approach to technical standards, timetable planning and disruption management, due to the fact that national governments have the final word on their rail industry. These – and other critical topics – are decided by individual countries’ infrastructure managers, only six (out of 35) of whom currently interface with the central European capacity booking system. This lack of centralisation impedes cross-border freight transportation. So much so that 80% of all planned train paths change between publication and execution, causing costs to spiral out of control and shippers and carriers to spend around 25% more than necessary on rail freight.
Unsurprisingly, shippers and carriers are no longer willing to tolerate this situation. EU countries’ inward-looking mindsets, fragmented national systems and lack of data-sharing mean that the percentage of EU freight transported by rail once again declined from 2021 to 2022. This unfortunate trend undermines the bloc’s freight decarbonisation goals, which depend on the greater use of rail (as opposed to more carbon-intensive road transportation).
Full steam ahead on new legislation?
Fortunately, the EU’s recent legislative amendments directly target some of the issues highlighted above. In particular, the legislation paves the way for a single ‘European Rail Platform’ – a body to serve as a bridge between infrastructure managers and broader rail industry stakeholders. How this will look in reality is not yet clearly defined, as the launch is currently planned for 2029.
According to MEPs, the Platform’s goal is to create collaborative solutions that enhance network efficiency, improve decision-making and increase customer satisfaction. To achieve this, it needs potent decision-making power and sufficient legal authority to implement its initiatives as well as uniting more players from across the public and private sectors – not just bring together those who are already engaged.
It’s also worth noting that recent legislative changes are merely a starting point and should be a springboard for further reform. Digitalisation is the real accelerator here, and the EU should invest further in thoughtful actions that close the gap between rail freight management and shippers, the end customers.
Why thoughtful? Too often, technical solutions lose sight of users – in this case, the shippers who own the goods being transported. What we need are customer-focused digital solutions that focus on collaboration, data sharing and visibility between end-to-end supply chain actors.
This technology already exists, so there’s nothing ‘technical’ preventing the creation of such solutions. The challenge lies in changing stakeholders’ mindsets. Having said this, the EU’s recent legislative amendments look like a sign that it’s now ready to prioritise increasing rail freight transparency, accountability and stakeholder input – a positive for the entire logistics transportation industry.