Incentives to freight railway undertakings compensating for infrastructural gaps: Methodology and practical application to Italy

The paper illustrates an incentive scheme to freight railway undertakings, proportional to the infrastructural gaps they experience on the rail network with respect to optimal performances in terms of loading gauge, length and weight. The proposed incentive is equitable and provided on an origin-destination pair basis, as opposed to the watering-can principle underlying current incentives schemes. In practice, it can be simply dispensed as a discount of the access charge the railway undertakings should pay to the rail network infrastructure manager. It also differs by type of train, to account for their different infrastructural needs, and can be adjusted on a yearly basis to account for ongoing network improvements. The main methodological challenge lies in the quantification of the infrastructural gap, defined as the difference of the unit transport costs in the current and in the optimal scenario, as a consequence of the non-additivity of concerned costs. For this aim, a specific procedure is illustrated and applied to the railway intermodal transport in Italy, to show the feasibility of the approach and highlight the differences with respect to the current incentive schemes.