Transport Information Group

Rhône to Rhine High-Speed Rail line will be delivered on time. This is what Réseau Ferré de France (RFF), the owning and managing company of the French railway network, annouced early July. The line will be entering commercial service by December 2011.

Five years of work to link Rhône and Rhine regions faster than ever

Started in 2006, the first phase of the project consists in the construction of 141 kilometers with 3,500 workers on sites, from Villers-les-Pots (east of Dijon, north of Lyon), to Petit-Croix, near Belfort (east of France). RFF guaranteed early July 2008 that the construction will be finished on time. RFF expects to have an annual traffic of 12 million passengers, up from 10 million right now on the regular intercity trains, quite slower than TGV trainsets.

Groundworks are 80% terminated (24 millions cubic metres) and about 50 bridges and tunnels (over 160 total) are ready. By spring 2009, RFF will start to equip some parts of the line with catenaries, ballast, and railtracks. However, RFF explained there could be no more delays, since 2007 summer weather did not allow to work efficiently everyday. (more…)

The French toll road operator and builder group Vinci recently signed a contract agreement for the Athena-Tsakona toll road concession, a major highway project in Greece. In this project, Vinci Concessions leads a consortium called Olympia Odos, composed of Vinci Concessions (36%), Hochtief PPP Solutions (Germany, 25%) and three Greek contractors Aktor Concessions (18%), JetP-Avax (18%) and Athena (3%).

A colossal project: €2.8 billion, 19 banks!

The project is huge: the consortium will design, finance, build and renovate, and operate the 365-kilometre long Athena-Tsakona toll road for 30 years. There are around 19 kilometres of tunnels, and 400 works of art (bridges, etc.) to build or repair. Also, a total of 163 kilometres of new highway will be built in six years, and 120 kilometres will be renovated. For the construction, Vinci Grands Projets, the contracting subsidiary of Vinci Group will be associated to the German and Greek companies.

The total cost of the project is estimated at €2.8 billion, of which €1.6 billion will be financed by a bank consortium composed of 19 different financial institutions. With this new toll road, Vinci Concessions now operates around 600 kilometres of highways in Greece, after having been known for the famous Rion-Antirion bridge, built under a Public-Private Partnership contract, and now successfully operated for four years. (more…)

A partnership contract to finance a €3.4 billion project

French Transportation Minister Jean-Louis Borloo confirmed that a future High-Speed Rail link from Le Mans to Rennes (more precisely from Connerré in Sarthe to Cesson-Sévigné in Ille-et-Vilaine) would be build, and financed through a Partnership Contract (contrat de partenariat) agreement. The project includes two segments of 182 kilometres and 32 kilometres (see the “LGV Bretagne-Pays de la Loire” website below for a contextual map) and wuold cost up to €3.4 billion.

The Partnership Contract would cover €2.58 billion, with Réseau Ferré de France (RFF, the public body owner of the rail infrastructures in France) bringing up to 35 to 40% and local Governments bringing around €1 billion. Also, €270 million have already been spend in studies, right-of-way and additionnal constructions.

By the end of the second semester this year, a public request for proposal will be launched, and construction is expected to start by 2010. Operation would start by 2014 to 2015 according to Mr. Borloo. (more…)

Everybody knows summer is a “slow” period. Thus we have not been writing a lot in the last couple weeks on Transport Expertise, but we did quite a bit of thinking to improve the services we provide, and to choose what we will write about in the future.

After six month of successful activity, we needed to figure out where to go and why. Also, some organizational questions have been raised, and we needed time to work on certain things like “How to market our work and the website?”, “How to promote the documents we produce?”, “What do the readers want to read about?”, etc.

To answer the last questions, we analyzed the site statistics and decided that we will mainly concentrate on five particular topics that have been interesting most of Transport Expertise visitors, since the website’s opening:

• High Speed Rail;
• Public Transport: infrastructure, rolling stock, operation;
• PPP / Toll Roads / Infrastructures investments;
• Green Logistics / Green Supply Chain; and
• Freight Rail and Waterways.

Also, in order to better integrate all the services we provide, we chose that we will publish directly the Transport Information Group Newsletter from a “transport-expertise.org” email address. The Google Group that we have been using until now will be abandoned. Working on the new tools will however take time, and we hope the new delivery system to be ready by September 2008. We will thus be able to send other materials such as new study released to our subscribers.

Activity will resume at full rhythm in the next couple days; our goal now is to publish two daily articles, one in French at 2:00 PM Paris time (6:00 AM EST), and one in English published at 12:00 PM EST/9:00 AM PST.

We are still working on two studies that will be released soon (delayed because of the previous reasons):

• French Offer in Urban Mobility;
• High Speed Rail in France.

We hope to see you on Transport Expertise in the next couple weeks/months. We thank you for your support, and wait for your feedback and comments.

Matthieu Desiderio, Transport Expertise Editor

There is a way to finance infrastructure when the National Government does not have enough money… simply rely on the Local and Regional Governments!

A future high-speed rail line extension is planned from Paris toward the west side of France, also known as Brittany, Bretagne in French. As of today, on a regular map of France, Brest, in Brittany, is around 600 kilometres or at least 6 hours driving or 4 to 5 hours by train from Paris. The new high-speed rail link would totally change our country’s map, as it did for the rest of France: Brest would then be at 3 hours from Paris by TGV (see below for project references) and not anymore “that far away”, as represented on the map hereunder. Note that this map was build taking into account the travel time from Paris to the different cities by TGV (French high-speed train operated by SNCF).

Modified map of France depending on TGV time travel from Paris

Source: La Tribune

Financing the project

First things first… Before seeing Brest at a reasonable distance from Paris on the previous map, it is needed to find enough budget to finance the project. After several months and multiple discussions between all Brittany’s local Government officials, they decided unanimously that they would be part of the financing team for this project, bringing €1.1 billion into the Bretagne Grande Vitesse (BGV) project (High-Speed Brittany). (more…)

Near Field Communication or NFC is a technology that has a great potential when associated with cellphones… In Asia, many transit systems adopted this technology and implemented it to ease the access to services related to transit trips, and mostly to intermodal transit trips. The last European Congress on Mobility, held early June in Paris, addressed this issue in an important debate.

French transit authorities (Autorités Organisatrices de Transport, AOT) could benefit from the development of such a technology, that could drastically improve ratemaking and ticketing, but also travelers information (for multimodal trips for example).

Groupe Ulysse: gathering phone operators and transit authorities to develop NFC technology

Both the French cellphone & network operators and transit authorities created “Groupe Ulysse” and are working on the technical and organisational standards to implement and deploy ticketing technology through NFC-capable cellphones. (more…)