International rail ticketing that is customer unfriendly – that is the system working as intended. We need EU law to change the system.

Justin Scholz, a thoughtful friend of mine, sent me a link to this post by Anil Dash, entitled “Systems: The Purpose of a System is What It Does” – do read it in full.

Let’s have a go applying this to international railway ticketing, and use what – superficially – looks like one of the worst examples I have encountered in recent times to illustrate the issue.

The example comes from Breil sur Roya, a small town in south east France, north of Nice. Half the trains at Breil sur Roya station are run by SNCF (French state owned rail company) and go to Nice, and the other half run by Trenitalia (Italian state owned rail company) and go either south to Ventimiglia or north to Limone and Cuneo (all of these places are in Italy).

The issue: you cannot buy tickets for the Italian trains at Breil sur Roya. This poster at the ticket office is shown here (click to enlarge). You cannot buy tickets for the Italian trains from the SNCF app SNCF Connect either. And this despite the Italian trains serving multiple stations in France, so these would be able to be used for inner-France trips.

What is going on?

The traditional way of arguing about this case would be something like this: SNCF is a publicly owned company, it is supposed to have a social function, and this line serves a social purpose for the people in this region, so SNCF should fix the ticketing problem. This assumes some part of the ticketing machinery is broken, and someone, somewhere, would simply fix it.

But if we apply The Purpose of a System is What It Does to this we come up with a very different outcome.

The purpose of SNCF is to maintain SNCF’s pre-eminent and close to monopoly position in French railway operations. The presence of Trenitalia on a French route is a danger to this. Trenitalia is already running some trains on other lines in France – notably Lyon-Paris – as a rival to SNCF. That the services in Breil sur Roya are not using a competition model, and are publicly subsidised, makes no difference. As a matter of self preservation for SNCF, any cooperation with Trenitalia has to be avoided at all costs.

SNCF not selling Trenitalia tickets at Breil sur Roya is not the system being broken. It is the system working as SNCF intends it. Being as tough as possible towards Trenitalia is more important for the system than any notion of public service or customer friendliness.

So, back to Dash, we need to make the machine want something else. Or, adapting it a little, force it to do something else.

SNCF and Trenitalia, left to their own devices, are never going to sort out cross border ticketing at Breil sur Roya, or on any France-Italy line. There is no incentive for them to do so, no opportunity for anyone within the hierarchies of the companies to want to solve cross border ticketing. So we are going to need EU law to fix this, to force data to be opened up – to change the system through changing the law. Now let’s hope a new European Commissioner for Transport sees it this way too. And, unlike SNCF, whoever that is might have a strong enough personal motivation to be able to push for the change.