During his trip to the alpine Savoie region in eastern France in January, French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe made no public mention of the 26 billion-euro project to build a high-speed train linkup, via a new rail tunnel under the Alps, for passengers and freight traffic between the southern French city of Lyon and the northern Italian city of Turin. It appeared as a significant omission by Philippe, just three months after President Emmanuel Macron’s confirmation, at a summit meeting with Italian Prime Minister Paolo Gentiloni in Lyon last September, that the grand project will go ahead.
For the public utility of this Pharaonic construction, launched in an international treaty signed by Paris and Rome in 2001, is now placed in question as never before.
In a report published on February 1st, France’s infrastructure orientation advisory body, the Conseil d’orientation des infrastructures, which reported to the French transport minister Élisabeth Borne, advised that the construction work on the opening the French side of the tunnel be postponed. “The demonstration has not been made for the urgency of beginning the construction, the social-economic characteristics of which appear at this stage to be unfavourable,” the body found.
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Earlier this month, several appeals were lodged with the government and the Council of State, France's supreme administrative court, against the awarding of a “declaration of public utility” for the project – a legal necessity for major construction projects before work on them begins – by local inhabitants in the zone where the tunnel will be built and also by environmental associations.
The tunnel project was given a five-year extension of its status of public utility in 2017, a prolongation of the status despite the evolution of several key considerations, and while the latest challenges to the project follow on other legal challenges in the past, they now highlight significant flaws in the plan, including a lack of clarity on the cost estimations, significant errors in estimations of future traffic on the linkup, and a patent shortfall in funding.
- The questions over funding
The Lyon-Turin link in its entirety is to be 25% funded by France, 35% funded by Italy, with the European Union (EU) taking on the remaining 40%. For France, this equates for the building of the tunnel alone to 4.77 billion euros, made up of an initially planned sum of about 2.2 billion euros plus a further 2.57 billion euros for supplementary construction work decided in 2012.
Inaugurating the building work on the link in July 2016, France’s then-socialist prime minister Manuel Valls said the initial tranche of 2.2 billion euros would be spread over a period of ten years. However, as recognised by the transport ministry in response to a demand for access to official papers lodged last September by opponents of the scheme, the French state has still not yet given formal approval to the financing.
The request for the official papers was lodged by local opponents to the scheme, Daniel Ibanez and Raymond Avrillier, who applied to the French Commission for Access to Administrative Documents (CADA) for a copy of government documents that established what public funding had so far been formally signed off and allocated to the project.
In its December 4th 2017 reply to that right of information request (see below), the CADA, in its attempt to identify the relevant documents, revealed that transport minister Élisabeth Borne had told it that “to this day, the definitive work on the trans-frontier section has not begun” and that “the financial engagements of the state have therefore not yet been pledged”. The CADA concluded that therefore “the requested documents are, to this day, non-existent”. Contacted by Mediapart last December, the transport ministry did not offer any further comment on the revelation.
Yet despite the situation, work on the French side of the tunnel has begun, with the ongoing building of a construction exploratory gallery at Saint-Martin-la-Porte, the point of access to the future tunnel on the French side, and the completion of three access wells into the tunnel.
While the source of funding for this early work is unclear, an indication was given by the vice-president of the council of the Savoie département (equivalent to a county), Michel Bouvard, in an interview with local weekly newspaper La Maurienne. Bouvard said the current construction work was “definitive” but that it had been re-classified as exploratory “to allow its execution in the shortest timescale and to benefit from the financing of 50% of the work by the European Union”.
The issue of whether the ongoing early stages of the construction work is provisional or definitive boils down to an interpretation of the funding accounts. The EU set aside 813 million euros in funding for the project in its 2016-2019 budget, but the sum is dependent upon it being a complement to national public funding given the EU has agreed to provide 40% of the total cost of the project. But at present, it appears that the EU is the sole financial provider.
Importantly, the 813 million euros allowed for by the EU cannot be spread over a longer period than 2019 if ever it is not entirely used beforehand. As a result, France has requested that the EU accept that the timescale for use of the subsidy be extended by four years, to 2023.
But beyond this, the tunnel project faces a perilous financial and legal situation in that the 2001 French-Italian treaty for its construction sets out, in its article 16, that the funding of the construction should be established and made available before the definitive building work begins. France’s Council of State has already demonstrated that it regards such an issue as crucial: in 2016 it annulled the pre-requisite “declaration of public utility” that had been granted to a planned high-speed rail link between the towns of Poitiers and Limoges in west and west-central France after finding that “no precise information” was forthcoming on its funding, a fact, it concluded, that meant no proper evaluation of the economic benefit of the project – upon which its "public utility", at least in part, depends – could be made.
Questioned by Mediapart about the funding arrangements, the public structure in charge of the construction work, Tunnel Euralpin Lyon Turin (TELT), jointly and equally owned by the French and Italian governments, said that tenders have been put out for contractors to begin the initial definitive construction work on the French side, at the enclosed section of Saint-Julien-Mont-Denis and the ventilation and security wells at Avrieux. The project management contracts for the tunnel construction were earlier this year handed to 13 engineering firms.
Gwénola Brand, the lawyer for one of the tunnel’s opponents who has now filed an appeal against the prolongation of the “declaration of public utility” (DUP) for the project, told Mediapart: “You have the right to extend a DUP if the [original] conditions have not been modified, whereas they have been. The project is no longer the same, the tunnel is different, the costs are higher. The Court of Accounts [the French national audit body] gave the alert in 2012 and 2016 over the catastrophic and worrying explosion of the costs of the project.”
- The imbroglio over the real cost of the poroject
In August 2016, a report by the Court of Accounts warned that the huge sums of the funding represented a threat to the financial accounts of the French agency for the funding of the development of infrastructures, the ATFITF. Meanwhile, the proposed spending on the link is at odds with the government’s stance of placing a priority on investing in everyday transport infrastructures.
The avowed cost of the Lyon-Turin link varies from one document to another. In 2002, LTF, the predecessor of TELT, estimated the total cost of the project at 12 billion euros. In 2006, a public enquiry into the project estimated the total sum would be 16.9 billion euros. But in 2012, the French treasury revised the sum at 26.1 billion euros.
Daniel Ibanez, one of the opponents who has challenged the extension of the DUP, argued that the mounting estimations represented a “substantial modification” of the criteria upon which it was first granted. He cited the costs of engineering evaluation studies which were estimated in 2002 to cost 371 million euros, but which almost tripled to 986 million euros in 2016. TELT denies the argument, saying that “in constant euros” the estimations “have not evolved in more than ten years”.
Even the length of the tunnel has changed over the years: the public enquiry of 2006 was for a tunnel of 53.1 kilometres long, while in 2012 the length was officially increased to 57.5 kilometres.
“There are quite unusual elements in the [tunnel] dossier,” said lawyer Gwénola Brand, “beginning with the extremely vague character of the costs of the project, which vary over time. If you read the public enquiry today, you are incapable of saying how much the Lyon-Turin [link] will cost. You cannot know either how much time the tunnel will save for the transport of passengers and merchandise. There are also very surprising points. For example, the journey time for the line is given without taking into account the stoppage time in stations, and is compared to the current journey time which [does] take stoppage time in stations into account. I have rarely seen a case so orientated in its presentation for the benefit of the project. It’s a paradox given the size of the project and its cost. We are staring at a political decision.”
- Erronious traffic forecasts
Another issue is that of the erroneous forecasts of freight traffic. In the public enquiry in 2006, it was estimated that commercial trucks using the existing Fréjus and the Mont Blanc road tunnels would total 2.8 million vehicles in 2017, whereas in fact the total amounted to exactly half that number, at 1.4 million trucks. Regarding rail transport of goods, LTF, the predecessor of TELT, estimated that the existing rail link between France and Italy would handle 16 million tonnes of freight in 2017, whereas, according to figures obtained by Daniel Ibanez, it in fact amounted to 3.5 million tonnes. In all, freight transported by both the road and rail links in 2017 totalled 25 million tonnes as opposed to the total of 61.1 million forecast by LTF in 2006.
“They got it substantially wrong,” commented Ibanez, “they were hyper-exaggerated,” he said of the 2006 forecasts. “The result is that, taking account of the real figures of the traffic, the project no longer meets the social-economic utility criteria.”
Mistakes of the same kind made with other projects have had disastrous consequences. A high-speed rail line between the southern French town of Perpignan and the Spanish town of Figueres was declared bankrupt after it attracted just 8% of its projected freight transport, and just 15% of the projected number of passengers, according to a 2016 report by the French railways operator, the SNCF. That example is all the more striking in that it is part of the same “Mediterranean Corridor” EU transport plan of which the Lyon-Turin link is a part. The cost per kilometre of the Perpignan-Figueres line was 24.8 million euros, while the per kilometre cost of the Lyon-Turin link would, on current estimates, come to 174 million euros.
- A repetition of the Great West airport fiasco
The new trans-alpine rail project has, 17 years after it was launched, taken on gigantic proportions. It raises a number of simple but compelling questions: who decides what is in the public interest and by what criteria? Can a major construction project maintain its status of being of public utility after it has been significantly modified, and why have the alarms raised over the tunnel’s cost not been taken into account? Finally, why have successive governments accepted that so much public money be spent on the project when surrounding transport routes are not saturated?
The Lyon-Turin project presents all of the failings that were highlighted in the case of the now-abandoned building of the Great West airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes in north-west France, notably the poor amount of information provided to the public, the absence of any proper study of alternatives, and a partial view of what represented public interest.
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- The French version of this article can be found here.