Is open access the most efficient way of Utilising railway infrastructure?

摘要

Yes and no. It depends on the perspective, the breadth of consideration, the impact of time and technical development and many other circumstances. It is in any case much too early to try to draw any profound conclusions on the matter. EU Directive 440 has been on the scene barely a decade. Against the backdrop of two hundred years of railway history, honestly, what does a year or even a decade mean in the overall scheme of their evolution? If you look back on history you see that the railways developed in a different way to their closest rivals, the roads and the airlines. In the case of the latter two, individualism was certainly the order of the day at the outset. It was only much later that a need for closer cooperation was felt on various fronts: technical, organisational in particular, and also safety.