There is a great transportation divide between Western and Eastern Europe. The latter is slow to catch up to wealthier countries’ growing high-speed train network, hindering cohesion efforts.
Trains revolutionized the transportation of people and goods, significantly reducing travel time and costs. Arnold Toynbee, a British historian, hypothesized that by combining steam power and rail tracks, all of which existed during Alexander the Great’s time, the vast empire of the Macedonian leader could have been kept together, with a considerable impact on culture.
Yet, steam power revolutionized travel only in the 18th century, and by the end of the 19th century, the world was ready for the first high-speed rail. In 1891, a Hungarian engineer, Károly Zipernowsky, lamented that trains only go 100 km/h and outlined technological plans for an electric railway with an average speed of 200-250 km/h, depending on the terrain. He proposed that such a high-speed train be built to connect the capitals of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, Vienna and Budapest, so that the region could serve as a replicable model for high-speed travel.
To this day, his plans still have not been implemented, with sluggish railroads and no high-speed trains in Hungary. This is not just a Hungarian problem, though. The first high-speed train in Europe began operating in the 1970s in Italy and spread through Western Europe, while Central and Eastern Europe’s efforts ran out of steam.
To be fair, there are countries in the region with ongoing high-speed rail projects, such as the Czech Republic and Poland, but in general, the region is far behind the rest of the EU. This causes problems with cohesion efforts as well.
High-speed rail has a significant impact on tourism, as the Central Eastern European (CEE) region could attract more tourists and, as a consequence, boost revenues. It is not only tourism that could help a country’s economy. Although the rail network in Europe, the Central Eastern region included, is quite dense, the car is still the dominant mode of travel. Yet public transportation is prominent in Poland and Romania.
High-speed rail would make it easier to find jobs in other cities, even in other countries, increasing workers’ mobility and reducing commuting time. Although there is no clear difference between East and West in the length of time it takes to travel to work, Latvia and Hungary have the highest commute time, and the poorer CEE region would benefit more from easier access to the place of work.
The upkeep of rail tracks is usually centralized in EU Member States, so ultimately, taxpayers have to foot the constantly rising costs of maintenance, resulting in delays of trains. In Hungary and Romania, for instance, the public railway company is in a dismal state. In Japan, however, the train service is the best in the world according to a ranking from 2019, in which Central and Eastern European countries came in at the bottom among EU member states.
Japan is also unique in that the railways are privatized, and operators do other, non-transportation-related businesses as well. Trains are not only punctual, but clean, well-maintained, and still, they are profitable.
Poland is opening up its network to successful businesses, but the CEE region needs to do more to reverse trends and be a trailblazer in high-speed trains it once set out to be. The pathway to prosperity lies in privatization. Let businesses keep up the tracks and keep up with the fast pace with which high-speed lines are growing in Western Europe. Let for-profit companies operate effective railways instead of the public sinkholes that gobble up taxpayers’ money without delivering either results or passengers in a timely and comfortable manner.