Towards fair infrastructure charges for users through life cycle-based economics and new forms of cooperation

摘要

European railway infrastructure is in the throes of tackling the greatest challenge it has ever faced. If railway companies don't take rapid action on interoperability, quality, safety and costs, they will fail to play any meaningful role in obviating gridlock on the roads despite unbelievably high levels of state subsidy. Thus a few years ago, spurred on by work commissioned by the Federal German Transport Ministry on "function-based engineering contracts", we found ourselves pondering whether the time had not come to seek out methods, beyond the usual methods for efficient infrastructure engineering, for railway infrastructure work in order to take in hand the dramatic structural change.