Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2004-04-21-Speech-3-379"
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"en.20040421.17.3-379"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner – Viviane – ladies and gentlemen, in view of the fact that it is now a little late and there are hardly any spectators present – apart from a well-known representative of a railway company – I will be brief.
I think that Parliament can be proud that we have overcome the hesitant position of the Council with the results of the conciliation procedure on the second railway package and have created a new, practical European dimension for the development of railway companies in the Union. With the amendment of Directive 91/440/EEC, all railway companies will now be given non-discriminatory access to the rail networks of all the Member States for cross-border freight traffic as of 1 January 2006 and – this is Parliament’s achievement – for freight traffic within them as early as 1 January 2007. At the same time, the Commission, Parliament and the Council recommend an opening up of the network also for cross-border passenger traffic for the year 2010.
Commissioner, we are grateful to you for the third railway package, as put before us by the Commission. I personally am not sure whether it is necessary to regulate quality control for freight services – which I believe should be left to the market – and compensation for delays and so on in railway transport – aviation is rather different from railways. However, we will do this in the next round. In any event, we are in favour of the opening up of passenger traffic, on which we agree, Commissioner, and also on the fact that we need a European driving licence, so that we can have a European labour market for railway employees too.
I would like to go on to say, however, that, with the new Directive on railway safety in the Community, we will for the first time be developing a European safety standard for railways, that we will be overcoming the small-state approach to questions of safety and will in fact be introducing rules across the Union for a uniformly high level of safety for private and public railway companies. I believe that this will be a major step towards a European internal market.
I regard Mrs Ainardi’s amendment on interoperability as important precisely because we will be able more rapidly and better to coordinate and accelerate technical specification work for rolling stock in other parts of the railway system. Finally, I also believe that with the regulation establishing the European Railway Agency we will have created an important institution which will be committed in practice both to European safety standards and also to the rapid processing of the technical specifications for interoperability.
Let me conclude with that. I believe that, by means of the conciliation procedure, we have created the right – that is to say, favourable – parameters for ensuring that in the railway sector too there is a European internal market and, now that we have created the parameters, it is now up to the railway companies – whether public or private, on that we are neutral – to exploit, at a high level of safety, the opportunities in the market and at the end of the day to achieve our common objective of reviving rail transport in the European Union and shifting as much freight as possible from road to rail, so that our policy can make sense both environmentally and commercially. We have thus taken a major step towards a reasonable modal split between future transport providers and a good new opportunity for railway companies in the Union."@en1
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