再European railways, November 10th 2012 P62 欧州鉄道事情
Bureaucrats in the European Commission sometimes remeble overgrown shoolboys playing with train sets, endlessly fiddling with layouts to make things run just a bit better - or not. It is the same with real trains. Next month the Commission brings out its ゛Fourth Railway Package゛, to make it easier for private operators to compete with state rail giants. The Eurocrats have huffed and puffed about this for years, without getting far down the line. Once again they face opposition from some national governments：France and Germany, in particular, are lobbying against the proposed liberalisation. Under earlier directive, France separated out ownership of its railway tracks to a new company, Reseau Ferre de France (RFF), and created another agency, DCF, to manage access to them. The old state monopoly, SNCF, kept the job of maintaining the tracks as well as running its own train services. However, last month the government unveiled a plan to bring everything back under SNCF, while keeping track management sufficiently separate from the running of trains to satisfy the EU rules. This is similar to how things are in Germany, where one arm of Deutche Bahn runs trains and another, DB Netz, looks after tracks and stations. The European Court ruled in September that having such an arrangement, where track managers belong to the same holding company as dominant train operators, is acceptable as long as there are suitable arrangements for keeping the two at arm's length. But Germany's small regional train operators claim that DB Netz causes fewer disruptions to the train operations of its parent company. France's independent freight-train operators also have grounds to fear their government's plans to reintegrate SNCF. First, RFF has taken on huge debts in building the country's impressive high-speed rail network, while letting a big backlog of maintenance build up on local lines. Second, SNCF's freight services have have been trounced by German and British operators allnwed in under earlier EU reforms. Even Inspector Clouseau would recognise these as clear motives for re-forming a state monopoly and letting it abuse its power. The European Commission is convinced that unbundling railway systems and prompting competition will be good for European economy. But the evidence so far is unclear. A study by Boston Consulting Group scores France's current, unbundled system highly for quality of service - though state subsidies may partly explain that. Yet Germany is praised for being more open to competition, with 8% of passenger traffic and 25% of freight traffic carried by competitors to the incumbent Deutche Bahn. However a study by Roland Berger, another consultancy, found that America, Canada, Japan, China and Russia manage well with vertically integrated railways. And Exhibit A in the case against zealous unbundling is Britain, where a review last year found costs were over 40% greater than for continental railways, because privatisation had left the system so fragmented. The transport ministry's recent blunders over bidding for the west coast franchise have done the cause of unbundling no favours.
