Railways and the Enrico Letta report on the future of the Single Market

Former Italian Prime Minister Enrico Letta has been spending months preparing a report on the future of the EU’s Single Market. The report will be presented to Heads of State and Government this week, and was published yesterday – you can find the PDF here.

A couple of well connected political insider friends of mine in both Bruxelles and Roma told me to watch out for the report as railways will feature strongly within it, and they are not wrong – there it is, right in the introduction:

During this journey, I also experienced firsthand the most glaring paradox of EU infrastructure: the impossibility of travelling by high-speed train between European capitals. In a continent as small and densely populated as ours, which has also embarked on the path of environmental sustainability, it would have been natural to travel by train, the quintessential green mode of transportation. However, this is currently impossible and seems unlikely to change in the near future, as concrete operational plans remain merely theoretical.

Hang on. That’s rather excessive. There are loads of pairs of capital cities in Europe that are well connected by train, even if not all of those lines are high speed. This, I think, belies Letta’s bias more than anything else – someone used to flying between national capitals, and wants to replace that with railways.

Further, if we take Letta at face value for a moment, there are plenty of capitals too far from or too geographically complex to the next neighbouring capital to make high speed trains – daytime anyway – a viable option.

Take Roma that Letta knows well – both Bern and Ljubljana, the nearest capitals you can reach overground, are both around 850km from Roma. Two thirds of the route to Bern is high speed already, and a third of the route to Ljubljana, but look at the parts that are not – high speed line along Lago Maggiore, Enrico? Or along the coast from Venezia to Trieste and then through the Karst of western Slovenia? Just to connect capitals? I doubt that would pass any economic impact assessment, and, well, isn’t the purpose of the report that we are supposed to be making economically sensible decisions?

Then there are the cases that Letta specifically mentions – he has praise for the Amsterdam-Bruxelles-Paris axis (because it is fast) but capacity is not what it should be, because of the behaviour of the rail firms – a point that escapes him. That there is no viable Bruxelles-Luxembourg-Strasbourg connection is bemoaned, but building high speed to Luxembourg was ruled out decades ago as not economically viable – presumably there are not enough people like Letta needing to make such trips. A comfortable InterCity using a portion of the high speed line from near Metz to Strasbourg would work – but can someone please tell SNCB, CFL and SNCF?

So, pretty much, going “connect up the capitals by high speed rail” falls short. It’s a nice slogan, there are some places we could indeed do that, but as a vision for the future it is intellectually slack.

Don’t get me wrong – there are places where rail infrastructure, and poor speeds and insufficient capacity on existing lines is a problem. And the EU has identified a bunch of those – the core ones are meant to be upgraded by 2030 as part of the TEN-T core network. More are meant to be done by 2040 as part of the comprehensive network. The plan on paper is OK, the implementation… well, it is rather missing.

Which is precisely where it gets better in Letta’s report.

Buried away on pages 84 and 85 it gets much more concrete about implementation – with a solid commitment to the European Rail Traffic Management System (ERTMS), Digital Automatic Coupling (DAC), and Digital Capacity Management (DCM), more power for the EU Agency for Railways. There is even something on ticketing: “here is a pressing need for an EU-wide, integrated, multimodal information, ticketing, and payment services framework.”

So while I have some problem with the rhetoric about high speed, when it comes to the detail much of this is good. And that rail is so front and central in a report of this nature is very welcome too.

Now then, who is going to be Vălean’s successor as European Commissioner for Transport from the autumn to actually get on with doing all of this?