On connecting Europe through high-speed rail

Context

The development of a European high-speed rail network serves several of the Union’s central objectives at once: the cohesion of its territory, the competitiveness of its industry, the achievement of climate neutrality and the strengthening of its strategic autonomy. Rail is, moreover, the only mode able to advance these together, and the only one on which millions of Europeans already depend each day to reach work, education and care. The Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy set the objective of doubling high-speed rail traffic by 2030 and tripling it by 2050, and the European Climate Law requires a substantial reduction of transport emissions by mid-century.

Progress has not matched these commitments. Between 2015 and 2023 high-speed rail traffic grew by only 17 %, and the network in operation remains concentrated in a limited number of Member States. As the European Court of Auditors has observed, what exists today functions less as an integrated European system than as a juxtaposition of national lines that tend to stop at borders, the cross-border sections and missing links remaining its principal weakness.

It is against this background that the Commission adopted, on 5 November 2025, its communication ’Connecting Europe through High-Speed Rail’. The rapporteur welcomes this communication as a substantive and timely roadmap towards completion of the network by 2040, and shares its central ambition. The present report is intended as a constructive contribution to that agenda: it endorses the direction set by the Commission while identifying four areas in which the Union’s response would benefit from reinforcement — the absence of a binding modal-shift benchmark; the limited attention given to social and territorial safeguards; a financing response not yet commensurate with the EUR 345 billion the Commission estimates is needed to complete the network; and the persistent fragmentation of the internal market for rail, which holds back a strategic European industry.

Connecting regions, and not only capitals

The purpose of an investment of this scale is decisive for its legitimacy. A network conceived merely as a set of fast links between the largest cities risks reinforcing the concentration of activity in centres that are already dominant, drawing investment and opportunity towards them while passing over the territories its lines cross. Such an outcome would widen the very disparities that Union cohesion policy exists to narrow. The rapporteur considers that European high-speed rail must serve the opposite purpose: to support the everyday mobility of the workers, students and carers who form the great majority of rail users, and to strengthen the commuter and regional networks that carry the overwhelming share of journeys.

For this reason the report places the everyday network first. High-speed services should be conceived as a layer that feeds into and reinforces conventional, regional and suburban rail — never as a substitute for it, and never as a competitor for the funding on which it depends. The daily commuter network is, and must remain, the primary focus of European rail policy; high-speed rail earns its place by serving that network, not by eclipsing it. To give this principle effect, the report invites the Commission to adopt a planning criterion ensuring that the network serves all major urban areas of at least 250 000 inhabitants — a threshold that sector assessments also identify as the point at which a high-speed connection becomes economically viable. This criterion is proposed first and foremost as an instrument of territorial cohesion: it widens the planning scope set out in the communication, so that access to the European core is treated as an entitlement of every region, including peripheral, outermost and currently under-connected ones. In the same spirit, the report invites the European Coordinators to give priority to restoring high-value cross-border links and to ensuring that high-speed stations operate as genuine intermodal nodes, enabling seamless door-to-door journeys.

A network that reaches every territory must also remain within reach of every traveller: a transition that ordinary citizens cannot afford is a privilege, not a transition. The report therefore treats affordability, accessibility and the fight against transport poverty as conditions of the network’s social legitimacy.

Making modal shift real

Modal shift is at once a climate imperative, a lever of strategic autonomy and an economic opportunity. The rapporteur welcomes the ambition expressed in the communication, but considers that binding objectives are necessary if that ambition is to be realised, the experience of the past decade having shown the limits of targets that are merely indicative. The report likewise draws attention to the structural fiscal asymmetry between transport modes — rail bearing full energy taxation and value-added tax while aviation continues to benefit from longstanding exemptions — which distorts competition to the disadvantage of the cleaner mode and sits uneasily with the polluter-pays principle. It accordingly supports a progressive alignment, while remaining fully conscious that measures in the field of taxation require unanimity within the Council. Finally, the report recalls that modal shift will not occur unless rail is straightforward to use, and supports the swift adoption of the measures under negotiation on through-ticketing, passenger rights and multimodal booking.

Financing infrastructure as a public responsibility

The rapporteur welcomes the announced 2026 European High-Speed Rail Deal as the occasion to establish a financing architecture commensurate with the investment gap. The report proceeds from a clear premise: high-speed infrastructure is a strategic public asset, and its construction, ownership and maintenance are a lasting public responsibility. It should therefore be financed predominantly through European and national public investment and through earmarked revenues from the Emissions Trading System, rather than through arrangements that defer cost rather than reduce it. Such investment must, moreover, be distributed in a territorially balanced manner, giving priority to closing the implementation gaps that have left parts of the network — and entire regions — unbuilt or long delayed.

On this point the report is deliberately cautious. It does not regard Public-Private Partnerships, Regulated Asset Base models or comparable scheme-based mechanisms as a sound basis for financing core infrastructure. Independent assessments have repeatedly questioned whether such arrangements deliver value for public money in large transport projects; characteristically, they transfer long-term cost and risk back to the public balance sheet, or recover it through higher track-access charges that fall ultimately on passengers and on the very conventional and regional services that share the network. Any role for private capital should accordingly be confined to the procurement of rolling stock, where it does not encumber the public ownership of the infrastructure itself. The report further makes climate resilience a binding criterion for EU-funded projects, in response to the repeated and costly damage that extreme weather has inflicted on rail infrastructure in recent years.

A competitive European industry

The persistent fragmentation of national signalling, gauge and certification rules raises costs and weakens a strategic European sector. The report therefore supports a green industrial strategy anchored in the Clean Industrial Deal, the consistent application of the Foreign Subsidies Regulation to safeguard a level playing field, a reinforced role for the European Union Agency for Railways in interoperability and vehicle authorisation, and the establishment of a European market for second-hand rolling stock that would lower barriers to entry for regional operators and new entrants. The difficulty in this field arises less from any single external competitor than from the Union’s own internal fragmentation; where others have shown what coordinated public planning and industrial policy can achieve, Europe’s task is to summon the same resolve rather than retreat behind separate national markets.

Relationship with the Commission and the Council

The report is consistent with, and builds upon, the established framework of Union transport and climate policy — the revised TEN-T Regulation, the Sustainable and Smart Mobility Strategy and the European Climate Law. With regard to the Council, the rapporteur is mindful of the sensitivities attaching to taxation, to the respective competences of the Union and the Member States, and to budgetary commitments, and has framed the report’s requests as gradual, evidence-based and respectful of those competences. The rapporteur recalls, nonetheless, that a network which is European by its very nature — every route upon it crossing at least one border — calls for a correspondingly European framework for its planning, financing and authorisation.

Conclusion

The Union has been built upon shared rules, a common currency and open borders; its completion by rail is the logical next step, provided that the network reaches every territory, serves the people who travel each day, and remains affordable to those who depend upon it. The investment required is significant, but modest beside the recurring cost of inaction — continued dependence on imported fossil fuels and the mounting cost of climate-related damage. The report sets out how the Union may move from the Commission’s roadmap to the binding commitments needed to deliver a high-speed rail network that is genuinely European, socially just and industrially robust.