european news

What place will there be for railways in the new culture for urban mobility ?

Last September, the European Commission published a green paper entitled “Towards a New Culture for Urban Mobility”, which by October 2008 should result in an action plan aimed at encouraging sustainable and environmentally-friendly mobility in European towns. Railways will play an important part in achieving this goal, both for the transport of passengers and of freight.

The green paper brought up several railway-related issues. The first, naturally, is to encourage the expansion, regeneration and compliance of urban railway networks.

The second main challenge will be how to achieve an optimal co-modality, in other words finding the best way for the various modes of transport to interact, in particular by developing integrated solutions (suburban railway systems, tram-trains, park-and-ride facilities), in which trains will play an important role. It will also be necessary to ensure efficient connections between the urban and other networks : suburban and regional networks, links to airports, stations and ports, intermodal freight terminals, and links to the Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T). Finally, even though trains are a clean mode of transport, they do create other forms of pollution, in particular noise, which need to be reduced. The permitted sound levels are likely to be decreased.


Towards the internationalisation of external costs for all modes of transport?

The European Commission is working on several proposals aimed at internalising the external costs for different modes of transport. It is mainly targeting road transport, by proposing an amendment to the Eurovignette directive which would involve the introduction of usage charges for heavy goods vehicles. But road vehicles are not the only ones to be affected. Air and railway transport must also integrate some of their environmental costs.

The European Commission has great ambitions when it comes to the internalisation of external costs for the road sector. But in the context of an expanding Europe, compromises are essential if any progress is to be made. This was the conclusion of the negotiation process for the 2006/38/EC Eurovignette directive. In the final text, the EU eventually decided that it would not introduce new road tolls to off-set the environmental and congestion costs, but instead it would limit itself to introducing charges to cover infrastructure costs only (with some exceptions). It also decided not to make the law compulsory for Member States.
 
The Commission is launching a new series of reviews and negotiations on the internalisation of external costs, in particular by means of the Eurovignette Directive. It had to present its legislative proposals by the 2 July 2008. Although the Commissioner for Transport, Jacques Barrot, announced in the spring that the proposed text would again be optional, he also stated that it would cover the main external costs of heavy goods transport (with the exception of CO2 emissions). It would also allow additional revenues to be channelled into the cleanest modes of transport, in particular the railways. But other modes of transport were not forgotten. By 2011, airlines must integrate the European greenhouse gas emission quotas (energy-climate package), and railway operators are required to reduce noise disturbances (revised version of the first railway package).