On 18 November 2024, ALLRAIL’s Secretary General Nick Brooks took part in the hearing of the European Parliament’s Committee on Transport and Tourism on “Passenger rights: Strengthening enforcement and improving multimodal journeys through new rights“.

There, he presented ALLRAIL’s main points:

▶ Multimodal passenger rights are a very good thing(!) Happy passengers mean more revenue for the rail sector and less reliance on taxpayer subsidy.

▶ To serve citizens, taxpayers and voters, European stakeholders should start off with multimodal passenger rights only for trips within the EU. Let us do our internal homework first – before sorting out the world’s problems.

▶ For trips within the EU, the private individual motor car has over 80% market share. This is where the bulk of modal shift to more sustainable transport modes must take place.

▶ To rival the convenience of the private individual motor car, we need door-to-door bookings (at One-Stop Shop digital platforms) on scheduled collective ground transportation services – with rail for the long-distance component.

▶ At the same time, over 95% of municipal ‘first and last mile’ ground transportation and 63% of EU passenger rail (including long-distance) is taxpayer-subsidised (by means of PSOs).

▶ Is there then not a duty to provide EU citizens with door-to-door bookings and end-to-end passenger rights coverage for such trips – on all those ground transportation services that they are subsidising?! 🤔

This logic is simple and fair: let us focus on what is important for the wider benefit of EU society, and more specifically for lower-income groups, for whom such services are subsidised in the first place.