Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2001-02-12-Speech-1-094"
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"en.20010212.6.1-094"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner de Palacio, ladies and gentlemen, although my sympathies lie very much with the rubber tyre, I am delighted that we have achieved a good result, not least as a consequence of Mr Savary’s hard work. It is clear that competitiveness on the railways has to be improved, and this is particularly important in congested Central Europe. Europe needs a long-term railways policy, built on a common objective. Rail transport must be subjected to an honest appraisal that weighs benefits alongside costs. Then both industry and environmental organisations will be able to achieve consensus. That is a miracle which is still realisable.
Improved competitiveness on the railways must first and foremost come about by reducing the costs rail transport incurs and raising standards of service. At present, rail transport still, unfortunately, costs the taxpayer too much money, whether he or she takes trains or not. It is time the inefficient state dinosaurs were made extinct to make way for a new, efficient, service-minded transport business. The railway companies are still very much a relic of the past, and their standards of service are poor and inflexible when it comes to freight transport. As for passenger traffic, that is an entirely separate matter: the most important factor with regard to service in this area is keeping strictly to the timetable.
The proposed directive being discussed is a rational one on the whole. The standardisation of technical features will result in improved competitiveness on the railways without there being any negative effects on the status of other forms of transport. Prioritising action by means of cost-benefit analyses will also be an important factor in determining how the most urgent measures should be implemented first, without wasting money. This directive, if anything, is an example of the sort of added value cooperation at EU level can offer.
In this connection I would still like to remind people about something that is important for Finland. Finland shares a border with Russia that is more than one thousand kilometres long. Russian traffic accounts for a full 40% of freight services handled by the state railways. Because Russia has the same rail gauge as us, one that differs from that in the rest of the EU countries, there are also a lot of Russian carriages and wagons that run in Finland that are built in accordance with the
standards. Finland has been accused, sometimes with good reason and sometimes not, of Finlandisation. But the use of Russian carriages and wagons in rail services that ply between our two countries is due to the fact that when we send our own carriages and wagons across the border we are often looking at their tail lights for the last time. For practical reasons we must be able to use Russian carriages and wagons in the future. Mr Savary, the rapporteur, has done his best to take account of this, and I wish to thank him for it.
Ladies and gentlemen, we have come on a long way since the days of ‘Stephenson’s Rocket’ in the area of rail transport. In spite of that, there is still a long way to go before we reach the terminus. As, ultimately, my words will hardly prove immortal, I will curtail my speaking time by forty-five seconds."@en1
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