La Guerra de Independencia y la Constitución de Cádiz

Over the last thirty years, Europe has witnessed a steady decline of railway transport performance, both in the freight and passenger market segments. This negative evolution seems even more significant when compared to the trends observed in other countries, like US or Japan, who have been able to preserve a greater participation of railways in the transport scene (EC, 2006b, 3.4.13 and 3.4.14).

Aware of the extreme importance of the issues at stake, the European institutions and the national States carried out a wide number of detailed analysis of the phenomenon, that finished up in the identification of a bundle of structural characteristics hindering the potential evolution of the railway sector, both at national and European level. It is based on these facts, the evidence of the decline and the diagnostic of its causes, that the EU launched, in the early nineties, an intensive railway reform involving the whole of its Member States.

2.2.1 Evolution of the railway market share

For the last decades the overall transportation activity has significantly increased in the EU-15, with annual rates around 4% in the freight market and between 2,5% and 3% in the passenger market between 1970 and 2000 (EC, 2003, p.88). However, in spite of this significant growth in the whole volume of transport, rail has faced a continuous reduction of its share in both markets. During the period 1970–2000, rail’s market share for freight dropped from 20,0% to 8,0% (Table 1), while in the passenger market decreased from 10,4% to 6,4% (Table 2).

Table 1: Modal share for freight transport market in the EU-15. 1970-2001

Road Rail Inland

Note: % over ton-km performed by all transport modes included. Source: EC, 2003, 3.4.2 Table 2: Modal share for passenger transport market in the EU-15. 1970-2001

Passenger

Note: % over pax-km performed by all transport modes included. Source: EC, 2003, 3.5.2

This situation has little changed during the last years in spite of the enlargement from the EU-15 to the EU-25 that brought into the Union countries were rail traditionally hold a relevant market share. Calculated over this enlarged basis, railway share evolved from 10,2% to 10,0% in the freight transport market in the period 2001-2005 (Table 3) and from 6,1% to 5,8% in the passenger transport market in the period 2001-2004 (Table 4).

Table 3: Modal share for freight transport market in the EU-25. 2001-2005

Road Rail Inland

waterways Pipelines Sea Air

2001 43,1 10,2 3,6 3,6 39,4 0,1

2002 43,6 10,0 3,6 3,6 39,2 0,1

2003 43,4 10,1 3,3 3,3 39,6 0,1

2004 44,1 10,3 3,4 3,4 38,9 0,1

2005 44,2 10,0 3,3 3,4 39,1 0,1

Note: % over ton-km performed by all transport modes included Source: EC, 2006a, 3.2.2

Table 4: Modal share for passenger transport market in the EU-25. 2001-2004.

Passenger

Note: % over pax-km performed by all transport modes included Source: EC, 2006a, 3.3.2

The situation is particularly challenging when it comes to international traffic, especially freight. An appropriate example is provided by the evolution of road and rail freight transport across the Pyrenees (Table 5). According to the European Commission (2007, p.83), in 2005 the international rail freight volumes in Portugal and Spain were equivalent to just 3% and 6% respectively of these countries’ international road freight volumes.

Table 5: Evolution of rail and road freight transport across the Pyrenees. 1997-2004 Road

2.2.2 Causes of the decline

During the last twenty years, academicians, practitioners and policy-makers have sought to understand the root causes of this negative trend, and have proposed a large number of them. This section shortly reviews some of the more relevant ones, which clearly illustrate the grounds on which the railway reform took off.

According to Stehmann and Zelhoffer (2004, p.328), one of the main reasons for the decline of railways must be found in the organization of the national railway sectors in very rigid monopolistic structures under the direct control of Member States. Such circumstance provoked the submission of the national railway companies to a wide range of political objectives, mainly in the form of imposed investment and employment policies or forced public service obligations. Over time, the situation led to a huge indebtedness on the part of railway companies and to a day-to-day political interference incompatible with a business oriented approach. The visible result of this arrangement has been the increase of the financial support for rail services and the application of compensation systems for social obligations that are not clear in their objectives and retributions. At the same time, as noted by Nash and Rivera (2004, p.4), the national transport enterprises frequently had unrealistic balance sheets burdened with inherited debts and with low relation to the value of their assets.

But this is of course not the only reason. Sthemann and Zelhoffer (2004, p.329) pointed out the fragmentation of the European market, as it prevents railways from competing with other transport modes in markets where they could be particularly effective (e.g.

freight international services running over long distances). Fragmentation has arisen from the protective nature of national legislation and the market power exerted by national railway undertakings, but also from the size of most Member States and the lack of technical interoperability due to different national standards and operating rules. The consequences of market segmentation are illustrated by Olivier Silla (2002, p.1) in a single but very relevant question: “whilst some 20% of domestic traffic in Germany and France goes by rail, how is it that traffic between the two countries is as little as 6%?”

Di Pietrantonio and Pelkmans (2004, p.3) remarked that a third cause explaining the current position of railways could be found in its technological characteristics, which had made it suitable for the transportation of heavy weights over long distances or for the transportation of passengers in high demand corridors. On the reverse, these same characteristics had led to a lower flexibility than its competing modes as regards the satisfaction of demand in its current spatial and temporal requirements. Within a context of transformation from an industrial economy to a service-based one and adaptation of the industrial activity to just-in-time production processes this particularity has become a disadvantage for railways. Furthermore, the guided nature of the railway transport and

the different speeds of the services offered make it very vulnerable to operational incidents, thus affecting to its reliability.

Other reasons that are also found in the literature regard the historical lack of investment on railway infrastructure because of a political preference for road infrastructure, the limited attention of national railway companies to customer care, the lack of service integrators for optimized logistical chains, the traffic priorities allocated to passengers, the non transparent cost structure of services running on international corridors (Di Pietrantonio et al. 2004, p.3) and the inadequacy in the capacity and quality of infrastructure, which limits the ability to operate high speed passenger and combined transport freight services on international routes (Nash et al. 2004, p.4).

The described problem of railway decline in Europe and its potential effects on the whole transportation system has been, and it is still being, a core issue in the Common Transport Policy applied by the EU, and has been the basis for the railway reform started in the first nineties.

The European Commission (1992, pp.24-25) already described the negative trend of railway’s market share in its White Paper on the Common Transport Policy and suggested a number of reasons strongly linked to intermodal competition (e.g. the increasing penetration of road haulage, the constant reductions in road costs charged to users or the fact that external costs are not fully internalized by the road mode).

Two years later the EC (1996a, pp.9-10) enlarged the list of causes including several aspects related to the conditions prevailing in the railway sector, namely: 1) the variety of physical characteristics (e.g. gauge, signalling, electrification, etc.) of the national infrastructures, leading to interoperability problems; 2) the incorrect management of railways, as Member States have traditionally denied railway companies to carry out a commercial business; 3) the inadequate investments in infrastructure, which have led to infrastructure backwardness; and 4) the low flexibility of the railway sector.

When in 1998 the Commission delivered its White Paper on the payment for infrastructure use (EC, 1998, p.3), it emphasized the role of distortions of competition in the unbalanced modal distribution observed in the EU (both between Member States and between modes). It also referred to the failure to consider social and environmental aspects of transport and the difficulties in funding infrastructure investments.

Almost all of the previously mentioned reasons are found as well in the later White Paper on the European Transport Policy (EC, 2001a, p.27), notably the lack of infrastructure suitable for modern railway transport, the lack of interoperability between networks and systems, the non-transparency of costs, the low productivity and reliability of the service, the absence of real competition within the rail sector or the strong competition from the road.

It is on the top of this analysis that the EU decided to launch, more than fifteen years ago, a deep reform of the European railway sector.