QWhen the landscape blurs, it is sometimes useful to gain height. Entangled in the bronca caused by its pension reform, the government is looking at the coming decades. After having paved the way for a revival of nuclear and renewable energies, he embarked on the adventure of rail. He was to announce this Friday, February 24 a major plan of 100 billion euros intended to change the size of the French rail network. An ambitious scenario, concocted by the Infrastructure Orientation Council, and supported by the CEO of SNCF, Jean-Pierre Farandou.
The equation is simple. Firstly, the fight against global warming necessarily involves a revolution in transport, which alone accounts for a third of greenhouse gas emissions. Of course, this involves electric cars and trucks, but also a massive transfer of travel from the road to the train, which is ten to fifty times less polluting than the car. Hence the ambition displayed by the operator’s boss to increase the train’s share of travel from 10% to 20%.
Secondly, it requires a considerable effort to modernize the rail network. Due to its commitment to the prestigious and very profitable TGV for forty years, the company and the State have under-invested in the rest of the network, in particular that of proximity and daily life. As a result, the French train, the one that works, is a “rich man’s train”, much more expensive than the car or the plane. Because it is the traveler, on the price of the ticket, who financed this technological success.
dilapidated
To convince the population, in the name of saving the planet, to take the path of the stations rather than that of the roads, it is therefore necessary to modernize the non-TGV network which is one of the most dilapidated in Europe, with an average of age twice as high as that of the Swiss train, the benchmark in this field.
This eternally delayed project is considerable. Even with excellent financial results as in 2022, the group, and therefore its passengers, can only finance, with almost 3 billion euros per year, the maintenance of the network, not its modernization. It is up to the State and therefore the taxpayer to do the rest of the way. Hence the 100 billion.
Even if the bill will be widely shared – the COI estimates that the communities and Europe will take a good part of it – this represents a considerable sum, especially in view of the public debt. So we will make choices. The TGV Bordeaux-Toulouse will wait for the RER to pass. A change of perspective.