The Promises of European Rail in the Face of Climate and Financial Challenges

Petar Vitanov was elected as an MEP in May 2019, after having served for 2 years as a member of the National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria. He is head of the Bulgarian S&D delegation. He is the S&D coordinator at the Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN), a full member of the Committee on the Environment, Public Health and Food Safety (ENVI), and a substitute member of the Committee on Civil Liberties, Justice and Home Affairs (LIBE). He has been an active member of the TRAN committee, having contributed to several files concerning the road transport sector.

Monika Heiming has been Executive Director of EIM since October 2011. She has been active in Brussels as a lobbyist and manager of international associations and groupings for a number of years. German citizen, she studied languages at the University of Cologne, and holds a Master’s degree in European Management from the University Faculties in Brussels and an Executive MBA from the Belgian Solvay Business School. Among her previous experiences, she has helped develop the association UNIFE in Brussels from 1993 to 1997. She also managed and marketed the engineering activities of European engineering group Europengineers EEIG from 1999 to 2004, before being made Secretary-General of ERFA in January 2005.

Olivier Salesse is Director of Rail Transport at the French Transport Regulatory Authority (ART) since December 2017. A graduate of the University of Paris XIII (Paris-Nord) with a DEA and a Master’s degree in industrial economics, he has worked for strategy and regulatory economics consultancies from 2000 to 2002 and from 2010 to 2016 (PWC and TERA Consultants) and for the La Poste group from 2002 to 2010, where he held the positions of head of the regulatory accounting department and head of the cost modelling unit of the mail branch (from 2002 to 2010). He joined ARAFER (which became ART in 2020) in September 2016, where he was in charge of the regulation of rail service facilities and the management of issues related to the opening up of domestic passenger rail services to competition, before taking over the Directorate of Rail Transport.

Thomas Lorent has graduated as Engineer in 2002 at ULB, Brussels and got a post-master in Management at Solvay Business School in Brussels.

After 20 years in international rail industry, in various fields from rolling stock to track infrastructure and operations, he joined Infrabel 6 months ago at the Strategy department where he is now Manager Enterprise Perspective.

Yves Crozet is a researcher associated with CERRE and is emeritus professor at Sciences Po in Lyon.

An economist specialising in the transport economy, he is a member of the Laboratory of Urban Planning, Transport, Economics (LAET) at Lyon University, where he was director from 1997 to 2007.

From 2010 to 2015, he was Secretary General of the World Conference on Transport Research (WCTR).

Since 2009, he has been President of the think tank French Road Union (URF). He is also a member of the quality control committee for the transport services of Ile-de-France and is a member of the CITEPA administrative council and the Conseil National Routier (CNR).

In 2016, he published a book in Editions Economica titled “Hyper-mobility and public policy: a new era?”