for future metropolitan regional express services, complex funding opportunities

Do not call them metropolitan RER any longer, as Emmanuel Macron did in a video on YouTube, November 27, 2022. To designate this form of transport capable of replacing the individual car in large cities, the Ministry of Transport or the SNCF now prefer to speak of metropolitan regional express services (SERM).

Deputy (Renaissance) Jean-Marc Zulesi presented a bill to define them, text adopted in committee on May 30… Around the train, the SERMs, at a tight pace (less than thirty minutes, including off-peak hours), can indeed include trams, buses , or even transport on demand, provided that they are frequent and very reliable. Real progress, but expensive…

The Infrastructure Orientation Council, in the report it submitted to the Prime Minister at the end of February, puts the figure at 17 billion euros, for a dozen cities. How will this new service be financed? This is the other question to which Jean-Marc Zulesi has tackled. In the absence of being able to announce budgetary financing, it proposes a methodology.

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Ad hoc taxation

To benefit from State funds – additional to those provided by the metropolises, regions and possibly departments concerned – the SERM must be “labelled” by the Minister of Transport. The condition : “That it creates a real supply shock to have a modal shift effect”, explains the deputy. Labeled SERMs would be eligible for part of the 100 billion euros by 2040 promised by the Prime Minister as part of the “new railway deal” which she announced at the end of February.

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Like the Prime Minister, Mr. Zulesi proposes that the design of the infrastructures of future SERMs could be entrusted to the Société du Grand Paris (SGP) – created in 2010 to design and above all to finance new metro lines between cities of Ile- de-France, the Grand Paris Express (GPE) – which will work alongside SNCF Réseau. “We therefore want to rename it the Société des Grands Projets”, he explains. The MP especially wants it to be able to replicate for the SERMs the financing method found for the GPE.

The SGP receives the special equipment tax paid by Ile-de-France residents, as well as a tax on offices paid by companies, an ad hoc tax system that allows it to borrow in the very long term. And to avoid the State to go into more debt. “SGP knows how to raise debt on the financial markets”, insists the deputy. For this debt to remain under control, its text takes care to define a golden rule: any increase in debt must be based on additional local tax resources.

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