2023-04-16 15:00:03
Has France finally won its major plan to upgrade French rail? The Prime Minister, Elisabeth Borne, promised, on February 24, 100 billion euros of investment by 2040. She thus endorsed the ambitious recommendations of the Infrastructure Orientation Council (COI). We must now move on to practice: schedule the work and its financing. This is the role of State-region plan contracts. The regional prefects expect receive their framework letters to start negotiating with the regional presidents and other local authorities, and put on the agenda the realization of the projects. These missives are however suspended to the last arbitrations of Matignon, who promised them… before June.
On the financial side, all the players are waiting to know how much the State is ready to put on the table. Bercy, which believes it has already done a lot to support the public company, is counting first on the results of the beneficiary subsidiaries of the SNCF − SNCF Voyageurs and the logistics company Geodis. But that will not be enough to settle the bill of 5 billion to 6 billion euros per year provided for by the plan. No more than European funding, put forward by the Ministry of Transport. A tax on kerosene or a new puncture on the highways are under study.
Once the financing plan is stabilized, what will all this money be used for? Seven priorities stand out.
Rejuvenate the network
At SNCF, in internal jargon, this is called “grey debt”. It is not a financial debt, but an accumulation of delays in the necessary renewal of the installations which allow the trains to run (rails, catenaries, switches, etc.). The choice having been made, until 2011, to favor investments in new high-speed lines, the network of daily trains and medium-sized lines has aged.
This cumulative delay in regeneration, the “grey debt” is evaluated by SNCF Réseau at 60 billion euros. The problem is widely documented: Rivier report in 2005 (named following a professor specializing in railways at the University of Lausanne); 2017 audit; opinion, in February 2022, of the Transport Regulatory Authority on the State-SNCF 2021-2030 performance contract; and, in early 2023, the IOC report.
At the start, a clear observation: the average age of our tracks was 28.6 years in 2021, compared to 17 years for the German network. Aging has been curbed by the closure of the oldest small lines and by the start of modernization work, particularly on the Ile-de-France network. But this was not enough the case on the other rails. Result: the channel consistency index (LCI), which measures the state of the network, is not good. A new rail has an ICV of 100, an end-of-life rail 10; a rail that has exceeded its theoretical limit of use by five years, by zero. A rail network in good condition has an LCI of 55. Currently, French rail is around 48.8. It was 46.5 in 2016. The COI therefore recommends, in its report, to increase the regeneration effort of the network financed by the State from 2.8 billion euros per year to 3.5 billion to 4 2 billion euros per year – i.e. 1 billion euros more – by 2040, which would make it possible to rejuvenate the age of the main tracks of the network by two to three years, and to set the LCI at 55 in 2040. “Remember that the route is 30 years old in France, versus 17 years in Germany and 15 years in Switzerland”, hammered Jean-Pierre Farandou before the finance committee of the National Assembly, which received, on April 12, for the first time since 2013, a boss of the SNCF. Total cost: approximately 20 billion euros.
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