La falta de legalidad institucional en la Nueva España y la transformación de la

The charging structure applied by each Member State is clearly dependent on the pricing principles and the objectives selected for the whole charging system. Moreover, the EU Law defines the nature of the elements that may form part of the charging schemes, though it does not include any specific provision on the functional relations or the variables to be adopted. Indeed, the Directive 2001/14/EC allows the inclusion of several additional elements in the railway infrastructure charging schemes, over and above the basic charges reflecting marginal infrastructure costs: mark-ups, scarcity charges, environmental charges, discounts, performance regimes or reservation charges.

The recent analysis performed by the RAILCALC Consortium (2008, pp.174-196) reviewed the charging schemes of the national infrastructure managers in the EU-27, identifying and classifying their basic elements. The research remarked the following aspects:

• Basic charges usually recovered marginal costs due to operation, variable operation /maintenance /renewal costs or a given percentage of total infrastructure costs. They depended on the type of service, the type of line, the type of network, the vehicle or train characteristics and vehicle variables like speed and weight, etc.

• Mark-ups above the marginal cost level are rarely based on pure Ramsey prices because of the need of estimating the elasticities of the demand. In consequence, the major part of charging schemes determines the mark-up in relation to a specific type of costs (i.e. depreciation costs) or a given percentage of the total costs.

• Reservation charges were differentiated in pure reservation charges levied before the use of the infrastructure and cancellation charges levied only in case of misuse of capacity. Pure reservation charges were found to be expressed in a wide range of forms: some were levied per train-path and others per train-km and some were intended to recover the administrative costs while others intended to recover part of the infrastructure costs. Cancellation charges are only levied in case of failure to use requested capacity. The amount of this second type of charges is levied according to different variables such as the anteriority of the cancellation to the circulation date, the percentage of volume of traffic requested that is misused, the time period, the number of train-paths, etc.

• Congestion and scarcity charges, set to take account of the effects of increasing saturation of infrastructure capacity and ultimately the scarcity of capacity were applied in various Member States.

• Performance regimes adopted the form of a bonus/malus charging scheme aimed at encouraging railway undertakings and infrastructure managers to minimise disruption and improve the performance in the railway network. Part of them were based on delay minutes accounting systems linked to economic penalties.

• Few infrastructure managers applied environmental charges or subsidies, which were mainly related to emissions and noise.

• Most of the infrastructure managers have introduced discounts available under certain circumstances, ranging from time-limited discounts to encourage the development of new rail services to discounts for charitable or nostalgic trains.

When the attention is directed to the specific practice of every Member State, the more remarkable characteristic is, once again, the diversity in the type and number of elements adopted, with a variable number between 1 and 5 (Table 11). Though generally each element corresponds to a component (e.g. a mark-up appears as an independent term in the “charging formula”), it may also be split in more than one component (e.g. a basic charge levied as the sum of an operation charge and a maintenance charge).

As regards the variables adopted in the charging schemes, diversity is also the norm among the schemes applied by the Member States. A study commissioned by the UIC and directed by Prof. López Pita, identified 46 different variables in the structures applied by twenty European national infrastructure managers (CENIT, 2006, p.41).

Table 11: Charging elements applied by national infrastructure managers in the EU-27

Basic charge Congestion / Scarcity Environmental Mark-up Discount Performance Regime Reservation

Austria X X X X

Belgium X X X X

Bulgaria X X

Chipre

Czech Republic X X X X

Denmark X X X X

Estonia X X X

Finland X X X

France X X X X

Germany X X X X X

Greece X X

Hungary X X X X

Ireland

Italy X X X X X

Latvia X X

Lithuania X X

Luxemburg X X X

Malta

Netherlands X X X

Poland X X X X

Portugal X X X

Romania X X

Slovakia X

Slovenia X X X X

Spain X X X

Sweden X X X

United Kingdom X X X X

Source: own elaboration with data from RAILCALC Consortium, 2008a, p.193.

In spite of the extreme heterogeneity that this evidence may suggest, most of the variables seek to differentiate similar concepts. These similar concepts constitute the

“axes” or “dimensions” of the differentiation applied by the different structures. A further analysis suggested the existence of nine axes among the charging structures of the Member States (Table 12): infrastructure, railway service, rolling stock, operation, traffic, time, capacity allocation process, contractual agreement (between the infrastructure manager and the operator) and geographical areas.

Table 12: Pricing variables applied by national infrastructure managers in the EU-27 Type of variable

(axis of differentiation) Variables

Related to infrastructure Type of line, Line, Section, Maximum speed of the section, Station category, Switch type, Switch category, Type of facility Related to railway service Type of railway service, Type of passenger service

Related to rolling stock Type of train, Traction unit category, Vehicle class, Length of the train, Technical vehicle speed, Weight of the train, Type of traction, Gauge, Number of pantographs

Related to operation Delay in departure, Time of use of the infrastructure, Speed deviation, Type of stop at station, Speed, Distance covered, Distance run out of the limit, Type of operation, Type of path Related to traffic Traffic volume, Traffic density, Congested sections

Related to time Period of the day, Period of the week, Time Related to the capacity

allocation process

Time preceding path allocation, Time preceding path use

Related to the contractual agreement

Type of contract, Contract duration, Difference in state agreed

Others Region/geographical areas

Source: adapted from Fernández Belmonte, Teixeira and López Pita, 2007, p.5