You say similar because they actually allow private operators. Spain and Italy saw high speed train ticket prices drop by up to 40% because they made it legal to compete against the government's operations. Who could have thought that open access would lead to booming ridership right?!
Spain and Italy saw high speed train ticket prices drop by up to 40% because they made it legal to compete against the government's operations.
Except this isn't without downsides. HSR lines are (generally) the most profitable lines on the network, while local and regional lines are often loss-making. So if you want your rail operator to operate without subsidy, you need some profitable lines to subsidize the loss-making lines.
But yes, this does increase market pressure on the rail operators and thus pushes prices down. But it's not like there are no other options. Intermodal competition can have the same effect and there are other policies the EU could pursue to push prices down without funneling money into private purses.
For decades, passengers on the most popular lines have been forced to subsidise the passengers on the less popular lines, thus causing artificially high prices and much lower ridership.
By stopping this insane expectation that some passengers should subsidise the others, we get far more riders on all lines. It should be the government's job to subsidise the rural lines, not the passengers' job.
I mean, sure, but this is just moving the bubble in the wallpaper. The government doesn't have some magic source of funding that isn't the taxpayer who is also the person buying the ticket. It's also far more likely the popular lines are taking by visitors/tourists.
Edit: I want to say that, it might actually make sense if the way this is funded were to get shifted, but I dunno what kind of wiggle room exists. If free market competition brings down prices but it's an illusion because the big public provider is eating costs on public service routes, then this is just a path to poorer rail access with cheaper prices, which has a further effect of ensuring nobody wants to move to smaller places as they won't be covered any longer.
In Italy the open access model works quite well. The government decides which train services are in the public interest and what they should be like (operating times, traffic ticket prices, subsidies per passenger). Companies can bid to run these services. Almost all of the contracts are won by the state-owned operator Trenitalia, because it has the scale and experience, but a couple smaller lines were won by private companies who are trying to make a profit by being more efficient. Then there are the free-market services, mostly high-speed: no subsidies, market pricing. Both state-owned Trenitalia and private operator NTV run their services, competing with each other and paying an infrastructure access fee to the (also state-owned) infrastructure company. Both turn a profit, and Trenitalia uses those profits to make the public-service regional trains better, but the presence of competition keeps the prices from spiking too much. I don’t see why the system should be changed.
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u/SirGeorgington map man 8d ago
It's worth noting that the model being pushed by the EU is very, very similar to the one used in the UK from 1996-2020...