European policies hinder rail initiative, commissioner says

Siim Kallas said these ideas are ‘detrimental to a functioning European transport economy as a whole.’    Current European policies are “meant to protect isolated entities, obsolete industries, privileged companies, isolated segments of transport industry” and serve as roadblocks to the Single European Railway Area policy, according to Siim Kallas, vice president of the European Commission.
   Speaking at the InnoTrans 2014 conference in Berlin on Tuesday, Kallas said these ideas are “detrimental to a functioning European transport economy as a whole” and present challenges to be overcome.  
   “The development of the Single European Railway Area depends on the development of transport policy in the European Union,” he said. One question is: where should the transport policy be placed? Is that a low profile challenge for Europe? Or should it be equal with other economic policy areas like energy, digital market, as an important part of single market?”
   The quest for a European Union-wide rail package has a long history. Most recently, on June 5, the European Transport Council agreed on the Technical Pillar of the Fourth Railway Package, which confronted the administrative costs in the railway market and strove to make it easier for new players to enter the industry.
   According to a press release at the time, the technical pillar would allow the European Rail Agency to  “become a ‘one-stop shop’ issuing EU wide vehicle authorizations for placing on the market as well as EU wide safety certificates for operators. Currently rail vehicle authorizations and safety certificates are issued by each Member State.” This, according to the release, would reduce time-to-market for new railway measures by 20 percent.
   Kallas said opening the market and creating an EU-wide rail policy will not only improve investment in transportation, but will also raise service levels. He added that breaking down barriers between countries in the European Union will take strong will and commitment, but that this is necessary because these artificial borders “hamper our quality of life and our competitiveness.”
   He added that two decades after the first EU rail initiative, an EU rail network like the one envisioned by the commission is still far off.
   “The big challenge for the European transport policy is to find harmony between environmental expectations and the hopes of people and economic reality,” he told the audience. “The European Union is about dismantling barriers between European nations. There are still a lot of national, economic, nationalistic, industrial, emotional and historic, and bureaucratic barriers in pan-European transport. All of them still hamper our quality of life and our competitiveness.”