Report from the Commission to the Council and the European Parliament. Fourth report on monitoring development of the rail market

According to Article 15(4) of Directive 2012/34/EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 21 November 2012 establishing a single European railway area (Recast), the Commission has to report every two years to the European Parliament and the Council on:
a) The evolution of internal market in rail services; and
b) Services to be supplied to railway undertakings
c) The framework conditions
d) The state of the Union railway network
e) The utilisation of access rights
f) Barriers to more effective rail services
g) Infrastructure limitations
h) The need for legislation.

Directive 2012/34/EU has broadened the scope of the Commission's regular reporting as compared to the previous Directive which now includes the evolution of the internal market of service facilities and framework conditions such as investments in infrastructure, price developments, service quality, public service obligations and the development of employment and related social conditions and that are presented for the first time in the Rail Market Monitoring Scheme (RMMS) report. The Commission's earlier reporting and monitoring obligations were covered under Directive 91/440 as amended by Directives 2001/12 and 2004/51 and implemented under Regulation 91/2003 on rail statistics.

This report is the fourth report on the development of the rail market and is accompanied by a staff working document providing all the annexes containing most of the data supporting the assessments. The previous reports were published in 2007, 2009 and 2012 and were systematically accompanied by staff working documents containing the statistical annexes.

Data for this report has been collected mostly from the Member States through questionnaires ('RMMS questionnaires' sent in 2011 and 2012) and Eurostat, but has been completed by other sources such as a Eurobarometer survey (service quality), publicly available railway fare information, annual financial reports, data for the State aid scoreboard or data provided by specific stakeholders. Data collection in some of the recently added areas such as the internal market for rail services is still being discussed in the context of the RMMS implementing act – as a result, reporting in such areas is still fragmentary.

EUR-Lex: COM(2014)353: Follow the progress of this report through the decision-making procedure http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/HIS/?uri=COM:2014:353:FIN

EUR-Lex: SWD(2014)186: Commission Staff Working Document accompanying the report http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=SWD:2014:186:FIN

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