Should the most polluting transport finance those that pollute the least? This is the idea expressed on Wednesday by the president of the SNCF, Jean-Pierre Farandou, suggesting that taxing air transport and motorways might make it possible to find the 100 billion euros promised by the government for the railway.

The president of the SNCF thus asked, during a hearing before the Finance Committee of the National Assembly, on Wednesday, for a financing plan with permanent resources and “a multiannual programming law” in order to guarantee the implementation. of the 100 billion euro plan. “If it is not funded, this project will not happen,” warned Jean-Pierre Farandou.

The project, announced at the end of February by Prime Minister Élisabeth Borne, promises 100 billion euros of investment for the railways by 2040, an effort that the president of the SNCF has been defending for many months. It is necessary to call upon “all accessible sources of financing”, he underlined.

“The motorway manna might be used to finance the railway”

Jean-Pierre Farandou thus cited the “new European taxation around carbon quotas” but also taxes, which might weigh on the types of transport which have a “more negative impact on the environment”. “I’m thinking of air transport, I’m thinking of heavy goods vehicles and we also have motorways which are an important source of funding. “According to the president of the SNCF, “part of the motorway manna might be used to finance the railway”.

Local authorities must also be called upon to finance regional express service projects, the famous “metropolitan RERs” that Emmanuel Macron has called for with “regional trains running every quarter of an hour” to “irrigate” large metropolises, according to Jean-Pierre Farandou. The SNCF will also take its share “up to its real but limited contributory capacity” and with a “red line: not to return to the deficit”, insisted Jean-Pierre Farandou.

SNCF’s plan for the future provides in particular for the regeneration and modernization of the network, the average age of which is 30 in France, “where in Germany it is 17 and in Switzerland, which is a European benchmark in the railway sector, it is 15 years”. The annual investment must thus increase from 2.8 billion euros, an amount considered insufficient, to nearly 4 billion euros per year, which would make it possible to “maintain the entire network in good condition”, insisted Jean -Pierre Farandou.