2023-10-05 05:32:33
At Bordeaux station, November 25, 2021. PHILIPPE LOPEZ / AFP
SNCF Voyageurs opened ticket sales for the Christmas holidays on Wednesday October 4. Very early in the morning, the SNCF Connect site was saturated. “We had up to 1 million connections per minute between 7 a.m. and 8 a.m.”, explains an SNCF spokesperson. During the morning, visits were up 230% compared to last year. “We sold the equivalent of six TGVs per minute”, underlines the SNCF. That is up to between 500 and 650 places per minute.
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As for Trainline, the competing reservation application, the observation is the same: at 8 a.m., the platform recorded an increase in reservations of 175% compared to last year at the same time. A few hours later, at the conference of the French Rail Association (AFRA), which brings together SNCF competitors, the speakers all asked the same question: how to increase supply to respond to this enthusiasm?
AFRA has its own idea on the subject, informed by the Italian precedent. Shortly following opening the high-speed market to competition, which triggered a price war and undermined the historic operator and its major competitor, the State decided to lower the price of tolls that the railway companies pay to use rail and which represents almost 40% of the cost of a trip. The price was reduced in two stages, by around 45%.
More profitable, operators have increased the size of trains and frequencies. Passengers paid less for their tickets and more of them took the train. Ultimately, the network manager earned more revenue. Can we do the same thing in France, with the same result?
Delays on deliveries
To find out, AFRA commissioned a study from the consulting firm Sia Partners, which knows this transport sector well. By adapting the Italian method to France with two high-speed lines Paris-Lyon and Paris-Strasbourg, Arnaud Aymé, general director of the firm for France, carried out a simulation: if we lower toll fees by 20%, we can expect 10% more resources for the infrastructure manager, 78% additional margin for the railway company, a reduction in ticket prices of 10%, a 32% increase in the number of passengers and nine times more CO2 savings than today. It would also bring France, which has the highest rail charges in Europe, back into line. Magic !
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Good news, there were in the conference room several members of the finance inspectorate and the general inspectorate of the environment and sustainable development (IGEDD), from whom the government has just commissioned a study on the same subject . If there is a martingale, it would be a shame to do without it.
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