This piece is authored by Annika Brack, Director of Energy, Mobility and Sustainability
A joke going around in Germany goes like this: A man in Wuppertal-Barmen wants a train ticket to Beijing. “Be-what? You can have one to Wuppertal Central!” So he buys it, gets off, buys another one to Warsaw. Then Kyiv. One ticket at a time, he arrives a month later in China. In Beijing, the return ticket agent asks him cheerfully: “To Wuppertal Central or Wuppertal-Barmen?”
In an absurd way, the joke captures the fragmentation of Europe’s ticketing market, and how passengers lose out when competition and interoperability are limited. In such environments, services tend to be less convenient and less innovative. These findings are not new, and have recently been reaffirmed: in open access markets, ticket prices tend to be significantly lower. Italy’s prices went down by 31 per cent according to this 2024 study.
Italy’s case was also disscussed during CERRE’s webinar on The Economics of Single Ticketing. In their presentation, CERRE research fellows Carlo Cambini and Paolo Beria put a particular focus on the European Commission’s efforts to develop a Single Digital Booking and Ticketing Regulation – an initiative that should help rail users find the best-priced tickets across operators and spare travellers from piecing together journeys one segment at a time, or having them fear losing their right to reimbursement when journeys get disrupted.
We learnt that this regulation is not just a matter of customer convenience. It is essentially a matter of competition in the rail market: it raises questions around the role of incumbents vs. not so small market entrants vs. independent vendors, of state-owned vs. private companies, of data sharing and pricing, data security and cost liabilities, of market growth opportunities and, of course: the role of regulation in all of this. One of the conclusions is that regulation at the European level remains the best approach to achieving a uniform and harmonised framework across borders. It must stimulate competition and innovation, not just solve for problems, i.e. support innovation in ticketing and the emergence of new business models with the increasing integration of all types of urban mobility with long-distance passenger rail.
At CERRE, our discussion continues and will culminate in the publication of a new paper in February.
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