Let’s take an imaginary trip from Swindon to the Spanish city of Salamanca. First we catch a train to Paddington, where we change onto the Heathrow Express, before flying to Madrid. At Barajas airport, we need to find the metro and take line 8 to Nuevos Ministerios, then line 10 to the railway station at Chamartin. Trains to Salamanca depart only seven times daily — so we’ll be in for a long wait if we miss our connection.
Getting this relatively simple trip right involves buying five different tickets from five different agencies and finding a route through the conflicting timetables. But imagine if you could arrange the entire journey with a couple of clicks of a mouse? The notion that the EU’s disparate national transport systems — planes, trains, trams, tubes and buses — could be slotted together to form a seamless, integrated, pan-European network, where one ticket could get you from Milton Keynes to Miercurea Ciuc by the shortest, most energy-efficient means, seems as unrealistic as the idea of a single European language.
But a white paper published last week by the EU has identified the creation of exactly that. The Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area states that “airports, ports, railway, metro and bus stations should increasingly be linked and transformed into multimodal connection platforms for passengers”, adding that online information, booking and payment systems “should facilitate multimodal travel”. In short, the EU is promising a single-ticket future that will be reality by 2020. They’re not doing this for our convenience. Unless Europe’s transport networks are whipped into a homogenised whole, there’s little hope of reaching the 60% emission-reduction target by 2050.
But can it be done? The last pan-European transport initiative was the creation of the Single European Sky (SES) — an attempt to remove national boundaries from air traffic control. Over a decade after it was proposed, the SES still hasn’t been wholly achieved, partly because Spain won’t let Gibraltar join in and partly because individual governments won’t declare air traffic control an essential service, thus making strikes illegal.
Yet the SES is a walk in the park compared to the creation of a Single European Transport Area, which at the very least will require the continent’s high-speed rail services to connect directly with major airports. Do member states have the money and the will to commit to such a costly and complicated project, or is it just fantasy?