A daily ordeal. The TERs offer a “degraded” quality of service with too many delays and cancellations, the Court of Auditors declared in a report on Friday. “Both the proportion of trains deprogrammed or cancelled and punctuality are at worrying levels,” analyse the authors of the report, who take stock of the opening up of these regional lines to competition after an initial report in 2019.
The scheduled trains did not arrive at the station one in ten times in 2019 and one in twenty times in 2023. And the number of trains delayed by more than five minutes increased in 2023, reaching 11.2%. According to the Court, these difficulties “expose passengers to excessive risks and constitute an obstacle to the development of the use” of these local lines.
Furthermore, SNCF-Voyageurs’ existing measurement tools “are not satisfactory, because they ignore delays of less than five minutes and are not designed from the user’s point of view.”
Increase passenger contribution
The Court of Auditors had also asked the regions, which contribute half of the TER budget (10.9 billion euros in 2023), to review the contribution of passengers: they contribute less to the cost of transport than in border countries. But most regions did not do so and preferred to keep attractive fares, increasing them only according to inflation and energy costs, notes the Court.
Most regions have, however, limited the increase in operating costs (linked to the cost of tolls charged by SNCF Réseau) by replacing the controllers present on each train with mobile teams, and by closing certain ticket offices.
The SNCF’s competition
Concerning the opening up of local lines to competition, the Court of Auditors considers that efforts still need to be made, on the part of the SNCF to transmit technical and financial data to the regions so that they can prepare calls for tender, and on the part of the regions to strengthen their expertise in this area.
Possible since the end of 2019, the competition between SNCF and other operators to run TER trains has been mandatory since the end of 2023. So far, only two lines have been awarded to a competitor of SNCF, Transdev. Overall, the Court of Auditors considers that seven of the nine recommendations it made have been partially implemented.
“The opening up of regional express transport to competition has entered a concrete phase, even if at an uneven pace depending on the region,” the authors of the report emphasize, calling on “all stakeholders concerned” to “mobilize so that it is achieved while taking into account the legitimate expectations of users.”