Open Access for Rail Passenger Services in Europe: Lesson Learnt from Forerunner Countries

The fourth railway package -still discussed today by the European institutions - plans to open the whole rail transport market to competition in 2022. Currently, only freight transportation and international passenger services are open to competition. According to the fourth package, the market for regional transportation should be organized around franchises and therefore competition “for” the market. On the contrary, competition for long distance services - at least for profitable services - should be “open access”.This paper evaluates the potential consequences of this open access competition at the European level based on the consequences of open access competition in the seven forerunner countries that have already allowed for some form of open access competition. These experiences may give us some clues regarding the impact of open access in Europe. It inventories all the open access services that exist/have existed across Europe. Based on this database, we construct standard profiles and strategies of new entrants.We found that it takes several years for open access competition to settle after legal opening of passenger transportation market. For most of the new entrants, the financial strategy is to minimize risk. Wide-scale entries with brand new rolling stock are extremely uncommon. Bankruptcy (or service interruption) are common. Therefore, it is unlikely that the fourth package implementation leads to a dramatic change in the functioning of the rail passenger transportation market.