Maintenance“One step ahead” (6 | 6). An essential lever of a policy in favor of the climate, rail mobility within the European Union also reinforces the “feeling of a common destiny”, estimates the environmental activist Lorelei Limousin.
If Lorelei Limousin shuns the plane, it is not only out of conviction but also “For the pleasure of the train”. The environmental activist has already crisscrossed most European countries by rail, crossed Russia and even reached China by taking the Trans-Siberian. She also turned her passion into a profession. After seven years at the Climate Action Network (RAC), in Paris, as head of transport policies, the thirty-something joined the European office of Greenpeace, in 2020, to defend the train and the climate in Brussels. If it has issued a severe indictment of European rail policies for twenty years, it also shows that the Union has assets to put train Europe back on track.
Is it so complicated to travel by train in Europe?
It depends on the route, of course. To make a Paris-Brussels or a Cologne-Amsterdam, you will not have too many difficulties. The trouble begins when you want to travel longer distances, between Paris and Madrid or Paris and Berlin, or between two large cities, Marseille and Barcelona for example. For the majority of journeys between capitals and large cities, there is no longer a direct line, whether day or night. Traveling from Paris to Rome by train takes at least twelve hours, whereas the journey used to be overnight. It is even worse if you want to continue your journey in more remote areas. Two days and two nights are necessary to reach Greece, and the trip is much more expensive than by plane.
How to explain the disappearance of many existing links?
The European Union has a very developed and underutilized network. The infrastructure exists between major cities to provide long distance journeys of 1,000 to 2,000 km. The abandonment of these links is the consequence of a determined political will and the reflection of a model of society which values overconsumption, speed and the individual. Almost half of the European cross-border links that existed in the past are no longer operational. The irony of the story is that SNCF and Deutsche Bahn gave up several night trains in Europe – notably Paris-Berlin and Brussels-Copenhagen – at the end of 2014, just before COP21.
The general trend for decades has been to favor high-speed lines and road and air transport modes. Public policies have all gone in the same direction, through taxation, land use planning or the allocation of direct subsidies. Governments have given priority to the expansion of motorway networks, to the phenomenal deployment of low cost air transport, boosted by public subsidies. They gave free rein to advertising campaigns for the plane, which arouse new desires and obscure the impact on the climate. The result is that rail accounts for only 7% of passenger transport within Europe.
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