Issues in Building the European High-Speed Train Network

Abstract

A European high-speed train network is profitable from a collective point of view. But the schemes devised by the European Union seem to be much too ambitious, and should be carefully fine-tuned. The project encounters difficulties on the grounds of interoperability between countries and funding, as the financial rates of return of the projects are lower than their collective rates of return. Anyway, a major issue will be to foster competition to increase the creation of new services. A means to go in that direction would be to decrease the scale of franchised services, and to attribute paths through systematic auction bidding. A unique European regulator is desirable, but it is not clear whether new tracks should be built and managed by the incumbent infrastructure operators through some kind of private financing and bidding process.