Rail freight transport market liberalization after two decades of its beginning

Abstract

It has been almost 2 decades since the opening of the rail freight market in the EU came into force. The individual Member States have put different liberalization measures into practice, and the situation on the market still varies from country to country. Efforts to create a single European rail market therefore still seem to be unfulfilled, while, at the same time, the call for a shift of freight transport from road to rail in the context of the European Commission’s decarbonization targets is growing stronger. This paper provides a detailed overview of the rail freight market liberalization process and new market entrants in the EU Member States. A trend analysis of the time series was carried out, taking into account the current status of liberalization measures and the development of transport services since 2007. The resulting model uses cluster analysis as the main approach for grouping the countries based on the similarities in the rail freight market, taking into account the performance indicators, the number of licensed railway undertakings in the market and their evolution, and, last but not least, the change in the modal share of rail transport during the period considered.