Despite opposition from eight regions in France, the price of TER tickets is likely to increase in the coming weeks due to a toll. Very bad news for daily train users.
TERs, like TGVs, are among the most used trains in France. Between 2019 and 2023, their ridership jumped by more than 33%. However, the journey is far from always a pleasure, due to the repeated malfunctions and delays of regional trains! According to figures from the Transport Regulatory Authority, 9.6% of TERs were cancelled or rescheduled in 2023 and more than one in ten arrived at their destination at least five minutes late.
However, new trains are regularly put into circulation and the regions agree to make investments. And here is news that threatens to make the situation even more difficult: ticket prices are set to increase again.
Indeed, like the motorway companies, SNCF Réseau, the manager of the French rail network, charges for the right to travel on the tracks. While for the TGV, this “rail toll” is included in the price of the ticket, for the TER, it is the regions that have to dig into their pockets. A tax of around a hundred million per year per region that allows the SNCF to finance part of the track maintenance, the rest being… financed by the regions. To put it simply, the latter pay a toll to run trains that they buy on tracks whose maintenance they already finance. Needless to say, this is starting to weigh heavily financially…
Problem: SNCF plans to increase its rail toll by an average of 8% in order to achieve “financial balance”. However, eight of the twelve regions of metropolitan France concerned are opposed to this decision, namely Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes, Bourgogne-Franche-Comté, Centre-Val de Loire, Hauts-de-France, Ile-de-France, Occitanie, Nouvelle-Aquitaine and Grand Est. They had also taken SNCF Réseau to the Council of State at the beginning of the year and obtained the cancellation of this measure for “irregularity in the procedure for fixing tariffs”.
But, despite this, the Transport Regulatory Authority (ART) has just validated in mid-September 2024 the increase in rail tolls for the years 2024, 2025 and 2026. It “validates almost all of the new pricing provisions, but calls on SNCF Réseau to continue improving pricing”.
This 8% increase represents millions of additional euros to be paid by the regions. To pay this sum, they will have no choice but to cut elsewhere in their budget or increase the price of tickets – moreover, the cost of rail tolls represented approximately 36% of the ticket in 2001 compared to 86% in 2024. Suffice to say that it is still the users who will pay the price, while the wallets of the French are already being put to the test in a context of high inflation.