Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-01-17-Speech-3-162"
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"en.20070117.9.3-162"2
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".
Mr President, long before the European Union entered into existence, we enjoyed good cooperation on the railways, with cross-border, long-distance train services, with people being able to buy direct tickets to far-flung destinations in their own countries and an international time table being available in every country. This good state of affairs is now under threat.
Finally, only the Savary report, which makes it possible for train drivers to cross borders more easily and work under technically different circumstances, is a valuable contribution to the integration of European rail.
The European rail network is in a state of constant disintegration of a kind currently seen in the USA. Soon, we will be left with only metropolitan district networks and high-speed links between the major cities. On 27 and 28 September 2005, at first reading, this Parliament missed an historic opportunity to retain and strengthen sound European coordination and high-standard services by going too far in its voting and by not going as far as the Commission suggested in the area of protecting passenger rights.
In Amendment 37 on passenger rights, the right for train travellers to be able to purchase integrated railway passes for the entire railway network of the European Union was replaced by a call for voluntary cooperation. This is how railway companies are given the freedom to curtail the sale of tickets for, and information relating to, far-away destinations, and, to an increasing degree, to restrict passenger-friendly offers for travelling abroad.
Last year, three major Member States abolished their Euro Domino Cards that afforded residents of other states better access to their railway networks. InterRail passes for travelling around the whole of Europe, which were mainly popular among young people for getting to know other countries of Europe, are granting less and less access to fast, long-distance trains. The public no longer have any concept of the overall shape of European railways. Since state monopolies have fallen by the wayside, the European railway business is being split up into a number of companies that are competing with each other on the same territory. As a result, years of cooperation have turned this territory into a battleground and cross-border links are being thinned out or discontinued altogether.
The European Union is sitting on the fence as long as it continues to assume that, on the basis of Article 5 of Directive 91/4401, railway companies must be run as trading companies and must, on this basis, seek to reduce costs as their main priority. This is how we drive train travellers away to air travel for medium-long distances.
The more public transport relies on the market, the smaller its chance of survival becomes. Not only the advent of cars and a widely available motorway network, but also tax exemption for aircraft fuel and the advent of price-cutting airlines has meant that rail transport is considered expensive in relative terms.
In order to survive, rail must be made appealing to younger generations. If that generation starts to experience the car and aviation as normal and considers the train as an inaccessible museum piece, railway will only become more loss-making and will need to reduce their costs even more. Those who expect that the position of railway is reinforced by inflicting the same mechanisms of competition on it as on air and road travel will end up catching a cold. This development is as detrimental to passengers and railway staff as it is to the protection of our environment.
I am aware that for many years, Mr Jarzembowski has been fighting for more market and for more competitive companies being admitted more quickly to the rail network, not only in cross-border freight transport, but also in domestic passenger transport. He claimed that, if his wishes were not met in the first railway package in 2001, he would continue to fight in order to get what he wants eventually in the third package. My group has never supported him in this.
In Amendment 35, my group has suggested not to go along with Mr Jarzembowski’s liberalisation report and, in the event of it being adopted, to at least enable the Member States to restrict competition. This can be done by adopting Amendments 33, 34 and 36, which have been drafted with that in mind. With regard to the Sterckx report, we support the wishes of the European consumer organisation in our Amendments 70 to 73."@en1
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