Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2010-02-25-Speech-4-080"
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"en.20100225.5.4-080"2
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"Mr President, I would also like to express my condolences to the families involved. However, it will be of little consolation to those affected – the mourning families and the seriously injured – if we continue to emphasise that the railway is the safest form of transport and that the number of accidents is very low compared with those on the roads.
Of course, the question of the circumstances arises. How could a disaster of this kind occur? However, as has already been said, this question must be dealt with by the technical experts and later by the courts. The question we have to answer is as follows: what has gone wrong in the process of creating a common European rail market? And secondly, how can we prevent further accidents using all the means available to us? Every accident is one too many.
As a former railway employee, I have experienced the changes myself. I would like to mention some of the problems which, to a certain extent, have an impact on safety. At the beginning of the 1990s, instead of introducing competition on the railways, we should first have started a process of technical harmonisation. We should have overcome all the problems that Mr Kallas mentioned in the 1990s. We should only have opened up the market to competition on the basis of technical harmonisation. The fragmentation of the companies has resulted in many players being involved in the rail system and this is a system which only functions properly when it is operated as a single entity. Therefore, in my opinion, the Member States, the rail companies, the infrastructure operators and also the Commission, which, as has already been said, introduced directives and regulations without carrying out an interim evaluation, share the responsibility for the most recent accidents. The evaluation was only completed a short time ago. The rail companies have made the mistake of choosing the wrong strategy and of waiting too long for a European system. They have constantly attempted to reduce costs, have employed staff without the necessary level of skills, as already mentioned, and they have also invested too little.
There are three points that I would like to highlight. The funding must be increased immediately in order to speed up the planned modernisation programme."@en1
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