Note to the new EU Transport Commissioner: fixing cross border rail ticketing will help millions of Europeans, and can secure your legacy

Dear 2024 nominee for European Commissioner for Transport,

Congratulations on your nomination. Being Transport Commissioner is a massive challenge, and an enormous privilege. As pretty much all of us living in the EU use some sort of transport every day, what you do is going to have an impact on millions of us.

But when you begin to contemplate the five years ahead, starting with the hearing in the European Parliament you will have to navigate, it can be hard to see the wood for the trees. The big picture is easy enough to see: you need to keep Europe’s passengers and freight moving, while at the same time addressing the climate challenge – transport is the only sector of Europe’s economy with greenhouse gas emissions up on 1990s levels.

But how are you going to make the changes necessary?

Attempt anything in aviation or shipping and you come up against international constraints, and strong vested interests. Try to speed up the electrification of road traffic and you have German right wingers on your back from the outset. Attempt plans that involve building anything and you will only see the fruits of your labour once you are long gone from the post.

Confronted with this array of complexity, both of your immediate predecessors in the post were blinded by it. Looking back it’s hard to point to individual decisions where either Bulc or Valean left their mark.

But there are Commissioners who made a policy theirs. Think of what Viviane Reding did eliminating roaming fees for calls, and how Neelie Kroes followed that up for data roaming. Those policies made a real tangible difference to the lives of millions of Europeans.

If you want it, there is a policy just as significant ready for you to turn into reality as European Commissioner for Transport: let’s call it the introduction of an EU Train Ticket.

As anyone who has ever tried to book a train ticket from one EU country to another knows, this is immensely more complicated than it should be. If we want to motivate people to take green travel choices, it needs to be easy to do.

On page 9 of your future boss Ursula Von Der Leyen’s political priorities (full PDF here) you can find this text:

To achieve our climate objectives, we also need to make it easier for people to shift to more sustainable options. This is notably the case with mobility. Cross-border train travel is still too difficult for many citizens. People should be able to use open booking systems to purchase trans-European journeys with several providers, without losing their right to reimbursement or compensatory travel.

To this end we will propose a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation, to ensure that Europeans can buy one single ticket on one single platform and get passengers’ rights for their whole trip.

Actually doing this is going to land with you.

Determined work by officials in DG MOVE of the Commission, political pressure from some national governments, and advocacy from all sorts of people (myself included) has brought us here. Given you this platform for departure.

So how do you play it?

Your predecessor Valean had an opportunity in late 2023 to act on this, but did not have the courage to bring forward a Regulation then. The big state owned railways hate the very idea. “Leave us alone and we will solve this” they say through their lobby mouthpiece the Community of European Railways in Brussels. But these are the same railways that have not solved this problem for the past twenty years – why should we possibly believe them now? And as if that were not enough, France’s state owned rail firm SNCF has just taken a step backwards by restricting sales of international ticket sales.

Fixing this will be a net benefit for the rail industry – make it easier to book international tickets, and that will mean more customers – and that should improve rail firms’ bottom lines. It is just that defensive, national monopolist thinking, and a conservative mindset, is rather too prevalent in the rail sector just now.

The only way to solve this is with a Regulation. On that Von Der Leyen is right.

Are you going to have the nerve to face down the industry and make sure this happens, in the way Reding and Kroes did against the telecoms firms?

If you do, you can get a Regulation agreed in 2025, and EU rail passengers can already benefit from your work by the end of your term in 2029. Your legacy will be secure, and millions of Europeans just a little bit happier when they embark on green international trips.

There are a bunch of technical issues that need to be ironed out, and I will address some of those in subsequent articles. But for the moment, and before your European Parliament hearing, this will suffice: bring forward a Regulation for an EU Train Ticket system that will allow passengers to travel from any railway station to any other railway station in the EU, and book in one transaction, and have their passenger rights guaranteed for their entire journey.

If you are committed to that, you can count on the support of this campaigner to help you get to the destination!