The cost of rail travel is once again under scrutiny in France after a consultative committee proposed a temporary €1 ‘tax’ on all tickets to raise money for network maintenance.
The French rail system will require at least €1billion in additional annual funding from 2027, according to SNCF Réseau.
To help cover the cost, a working group dedicated to rail development mooted the idea of a user contribution at the Ambition France Transports conference in June.
Dubbed the contribution à la rénovation des voies, it was championed by former Socialist MP Gilles Savary, who said it could raise €800million a year.
However, the idea has been met with criticism.
“The idea of the tax, put forward by the committee, was not unanimous. We were strongly against it,” François Delétraz, president of the Fédération Nationale des Associations d'Usagers des Transports (FNAUT), told The Connexion.
“It is not the passenger who should pay for the rail network, but the government, and every time there has been a system whereby passengers pay, it has led to a deterioration of the rail network.”
Mr Delétraz would instead like to see an ecotax on heavy goods vehicles (see below), in line with the “polluter pays” principle favored by the French government for several years.
Train operators already complain that the ‘toll’ they have to pay to the company that maintains the railways, which averages 40% of the ticket price on high speed trains, is among the highest in Europe.
On other networks, the proportion of money for maintenance from tolls on railway use is lower, and the amount paid for out of taxes higher.
In addition, French rail workers, most of whom are on salaries indexed to the minimum wage, have seen steady wage increases with inflation.
The result is that SNCF full-price tickets can now be much more expensive than the cost of going by car.
A one-way, second-class ticket from Angoulême (Charente) to Paris, for example, is €120 for a distance of 450km. By car, by comparison, tolls would cost €40 and fuel approximately €36 for the same journey.
When high-speed trains were introduced on the line in the 1990s, it was cheaper for one person to travel by train to Paris than to take a car.
Mr Delétraz emphasized that he considered tickets on TGV high-speed trains to be expensive, where tolls to use the rail network cost €40 of a €100 ticket, compared with a toll of €15 on a €100 ticket in Italy.
On TER regional trains, where on average tickets only cover 25% of the price of running the trains, Mr Delétraz believed fares were reasonably priced.
Even SNCF’s ‘low-cost’ TGV trains, called Ouigo, saw prices rise by 43% between 2018 and 2023, research published this year by FNAUT showed.
This has led to the absurd situation whereby people who bought discount cards for €49 a year have found it cheaper to travel on the supposedly more expensive Inoui TGV trains than on a Ouigo.
SNCF no longer holds a monopoly on rail services in France. European directives adopted in recent years have opened rail services up to competitors including Trenitalia, which now runs services between Paris and Lyon and Paris and Marseille, as well as between Paris and Milan.
Spanish train company Renfe has also started running services between Lyon and Barcelona and between Marseille and Madrid.
However, the slow start to the service means plans by Renfe to include Toulouse and Paris in its French offer have been postponed.
And plans for cross-country TGV services by a firm called Le Train, initially announced for 2025, are now only expected to see fruition in the form of a Bordeaux-Nantes line in 2028.
Meanwhile, British company Virgin Trains aims to become the first ever competitor to Eurostar with services between London and Paris, but not before 2029 at the earliest.
SNCF, which sells almost all train tickets in France through its SNCF Connect website and app, has refused to sell tickets for its rivals.
Mr Delétraz said it was important for the state to invest more in rail service in France.
“French people love travelling by train, and it is less polluting than other forms of transport.
“This summer, in spite of the high prices and the lack of trains, stations and trains were absolutely packed.
“At the moment 82% of travel in France is by car, 15% by train and 1% by air [buses and bicycles make up the rest], and the only way to change this is by improving our railways and making sure they are a reasonable price.
But the only way that will happen is if the government pays to maintain and improve the rail network – not the users.”
What is the ecotax on HGVs that rail campaigners want?
Alsace will introduce a pilot scheme in 2027 whereby the heaviest lorries pay an ‘ecotax’ to use its roads.
It will be followed by Lorraine and Champagne-Ardenne, before potentially being rolled out elsewhere in France.
The scheme will target vehicles weighing more than 3.5 tonnes. The government says it is the only solution to combat the growth in this traffic, which is exacerbated by the many European transit drivers who use the region’s roads to bypass high ecotaxes already in place on Germany's motorways.
The tax was originally proposed on French roads more than a decade ago. Lorries were to be weighed at strategic points and tracked by cameras on gantries. Transporters would then be billed based on lorry weight.
As well as providing cash to maintain roads, the idea was to reduce the amount of fuel burnt and encourage the use of smaller lorries, instead of having 40-tonne vehicles with small loads on the roads.
While welcomed in the east of France and along main routes between France and Spain, the original eco-tax prompted the ‘Bonnets rouges’ protest movement in Brittany in October 2013, where it was considered harmful to Breton agriculture.
It was eventually scrapped in 2014.
