Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2009-11-24-Speech-2-482"
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"en.20091124.38.2-482"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, before turning to the debate, I would like to make some essential introductory remarks.
The International Wagon Regulations system, in force prior to the opening up of the market until 2006, gave national undertakings the responsibility and the freedom to determine all of these aspects. Such an absence of harmonised standards no longer seems acceptable in the new framework, which is governed by technical specifications for interoperability for wagons, and by the new private agreement, the General Contract of Use for Wagons, between technical wagon operators and railway undertakings.
With regard to certification of the entity in charge of maintenance, the European Railway Agency will do everything in its power to enable the Commission to comply with the timetable set out in the actual directive, and adopt the certification system by the end of 2010.
Far from being an additional obstacle for operators in the railway sector, the certification system, which will specify the criteria which must be met in order for a rail operator to be recognised as an entity in charge of maintenance, will open up opportunities which, until today, have been limited only to certain undertakings.
The national practices or shortcomings which hamper interoperability relate principally to the transition from the old system, governed by national railway monopolies, to the new system, brought in by the directives on interoperability and rail safety. The barriers in question are described in the communication adopted by the Commission in September.
In order to eliminate these barriers, in 2008, the Railway Agency began work on the cross-acceptance of rolling stock. In this connection, the agency is classifying all national standards on the basis of a harmonised list of technical parameters, before moving on to a comparison of the standards in the various Member States in order to establish the degree of equivalence. The goal is to do away with the practice, common in the railway sector, of resorting to national standards to obstruct the approval of rolling stock already approved by other States.
Furthermore, the tardiness of the Member States and industry in conforming to the new legal framework represents a further barrier to interoperability. Indeed, this tardiness is hindering the creation of a European railway area based on common harmonised standards, standards necessary to permit the optimum functioning of the market.
I have spoken for a long time, but there were a great many questions. I will now start to conclude.
As for the ERTMS, it is in place and has given positive results on over 2 000 kilometres. It is true that the original specifications had ambiguities which gave rise to different interpretations, but these ambiguities were eliminated in 2007. The Commission’s Decision of 23 March 2008 made it compulsory to use this new version, known as ‘2.3.0d’.
The Member States and this sector are currently working to upgrade the train lines affected and the problem of incompatible applications at national level is therefore being resolved. All the new applications take the compatible standard as their basis.
The Commission, in line with its own commitments, will provide financial support for the sector to upgrade all the lines and trains already fitted with this system so that they are compatible with the new version. To this end, within the framework of the 2009 call for proposals, EUR 250 million was allocated for the ERTMS, part of which will be used specifically to update the relevant computer programs.
Only when the technical investigations carried out by the independent Italian and Dutch bodies have pinpointed the exact causes of the accidents in Viareggio and in the Netherlands will we be able to draw specific conclusions with regard to possible improvements in Community legislation on the safety of rail transport.
Furthermore, as Mr Simpson highlighted, despite the two accidents, which we must obviously learn from in terms of rail safety – precisely to show our commitment on this, we organised a series of events which Mr Simpson also attended – I wish to stress that rail transport in Europe nevertheless offers an especially high level of safety compared with other means of transport.
Indeed, the report on the current first rail package, adopted by the Commission in 2006, and the latest statistics indicate that the opening up of the market to competition has not had any negative impact on the overall level of rail safety which, on the contrary, continues to improve. We must, however, be vigilant to ensure that this improvement continues, and we certainly cannot settle for the results already obtained. Liberalisation, in fact, means that the number of operators on our networks is continuing to grow, and we must therefore continually assess the quality of the operators present.
Following the Viareggio accident, the Commission and the European Railway Agency organised a large number of meetings with all the interested parties, and a short- and long-term plan of action was drawn up in order to reduce, as far as possible, the risk of such accidents happening again. The plan was adopted at the conference on rail safety organised – as I said earlier – by the Commission on 8 September 2009.
Turning to the specific question of the safety of freight wagons, particularly maintenance of their critical components such as axles, the European Railway Agency has created a task force composed of experts from industry and from national safety authorities, which has already met on three occasions.
The task force has a specific two-step work programme which requires results to be published in December 2009 and June 2010.
Step 1 consists of developing an urgent inspection programme to ascertain the state of the wagons in use as well as the quality of their axles. It is important, however, that these measures are not adopted in isolation at national level, but that they are coordinated at European level in order to obtain results accepted in all Member States.
In Step 2, the more general issue of wagon maintenance will be addressed in order to determine whether it is necessary to harmonise, and to what extent, the various elements of the maintenance system, namely technical standards, procedures and measuring and testing methods."@en1
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