Socially Necessary Rail Services

Abstract

Rail services across Europe are facing problems due to declining market share, lack of
responsiveness to market changes and customers’ needs. Policy initiatives are put forward to
change this situation and provide viable solutions, e.g. as presented in the EC White Paper
from 1996 on Revitalising the Community’s Railways. Many rail services are loss-making
and will continue to be so such that these services can only be provided through financial
support from the State. Given that resources are scarce it is important that this support is
allocated according to the social value from these services.
This paper will present the EC funded SONERAIL project, which has concerned an
examination of socially necessary rail services. In particular, it has developed an evaluation
methodology which allows for the assessment of the costs and benefits associated with
providing a given rail service.
The paper is planned as follows. Section 1 will give an overview of the SONERAIL project
in terms of background, objectives and project structure. In section 2 the SONERAIL
definition of a socially necessary rail service will be described. The evaluation methodology
developed during the project will be examined in section 3. Subsequently, section 4 will
discuss the potential for applying the methodology in practice. Section 5 considers possible
future scenarios while best-practice recommendations regarding the provision and evaluation
of socially necessary rail services are given in section 6.