Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2000-05-16-Speech-2-278"
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"en.20000516.11.2-278"2
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"Mr President, despite European integration, the rail system is disintegrating. It is increasingly hard to obtain international rail timetables and it is often the case that train tickets to remote destinations have to be bought outside the country of departure. Not so long ago, it was possible to take a direct train from Cologne to Athens, from Paris to Lisbon or from Amsterdam to Copenhagen. This is now a thing of the past.
My group would like to see trade-union rights, participation, working conditions and work pressure given a more prominent role. Luckily, the rapporteur is not yielding under the pressure to consider personnel as a cost factor alone. I am pleased that Mr Savary’s proposals help strike a happy balance.
Meanwhile, railways are, however, in the process of being re-discovered. The times when trains were seen as a burden inherited from the nineteenth century, something that can be neglected and dismantled, are fortunately over. Almost everyone admits that trains should once again play a key role in European long-haul transport for people and goods alike. This is not just necessary to meet the increasing demand for transport options, but mainly to curb the tide of cars and aeroplanes which form a threat to the environment.
The views on how to modernise the rail system are strongly divided. For a long time, it was fashionable to apply everything that had contributed to the emergence of cars and aeroplanes to trains. According to this line of thinking, everything should come down in price and should become flexible, so that price-based competition has a less detrimental effect on trains. Some people still advocate that everything should be privatised and liberalised, that the influence of trade unions must be restrained and that railway personnel should perform more work for lower wages. According to the Confederal Group of the European United Left/Nordic Green Left, these remedies are worse than the disease. These would reportedly lead to further decay of the railway business and deterioration in the quality of services, and would force personnel to strike more, for reasons of self-preservation.
The real solutions must be sought in a completely different direction. For starters, there should be better cooperation between the existing national railway companies in the management of frequent and fast cross-border routes.
In the case of the conventional railway system, the routes Brussels to Amsterdam, Hamburg to Copenhagen and Dublin to Belfast are good examples of this. The passengers are unaware that it is two companies who are responsible for this one joint and frequent link. This could also apply to the extensions of the French high-speed links in England, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany which are running under the names "Eurostar" and "Thalys".
To guarantee success, it is important not to bring in a whole ream of new commercial businesses, which would lead to bad connections and variable pricing. Furthermore, the money to finance such a high-speed network should not be found through cutting down services on short-haul routes in the individual Member States, as many people are indignant – and rightly so – about the huge amount of funding being ploughed into fast connections for the benefit of a small, privileged minority.
The construction of new high-speed links will continue to meet with protest if the ordinary domestic train user only ever experiences higher prices and fewer facilities and if they do not solve the environmental problems caused by cars and aeroplanes.
Needless to say, technology should be better harmonised by means of common mains voltage, joint equipment, fewer changes for passengers at borders and uniform safety requirements. Privatisation and fragmentation according to the British model offer no guarantee whatsoever that those improvements could be better accommodated than if we were to keep the present state enterprises.
The position of the one million employees in the European rail system must be protected. They are people who offer useful services to each and every one of us. This is why they should not come at the bottom of the list in our railway policy, as is sometimes advocated, I regret to say, by those in favour of a commercial approach."@en1
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