DG MOVE is the European Commission department that drafts EU transport legislation and monitors how member states apply it, across rail, road, aviation, maritime and inland waterways. It writes and enforces the rules of the European rail market. Vehicle authorisation and operator certification sit with ERA.
Every directive and regulation a European railway works under begins in this department. DG MOVE prepares the legislative proposals, steers them through negotiation with the European Parliament and the Council, and afterwards checks national transposition — opening infringement proceedings where a member state falls short.
Political responsibility sits with the Commissioner for Sustainable Transport and Tourism, Apostolos Tzitzikostas. The administrative head is Director-General Magda Kopczyńska, in post since August 2023, supported by Deputy Director-General Maja Bakran Marcich.
The rail acquis is written here
The department owns both halves of the European rail framework. One half is the market architecture that separates infrastructure management from train operation and opens services to competition; the other is the technical framework that makes a train built in one country usable in another.
Directive 2012/34/EU, the interoperability and safety directives and the TEN-T Regulation are all DG MOVE files. So are the implementing acts beneath them, including the European deployment plan that fixes where and when ERTMS must be installed.
The department also holds the funding levers. Transport allocations under the Connecting Europe Facility are shaped here, although the calls for proposals and the grant agreements themselves are administered by the European Climate, Infrastructure and Environment Executive Agency (CINEA).
The division of labour with ERA
DG MOVE deliberately does no casework. Vehicle authorisations, single safety certificates and ERTMS trackside approvals are handled by ERA, which operates under a mandate the department drafted and the co-legislators adopted.
A slow authorisation is an agency problem. A national technical rule that should never have survived transposition is a Commission problem.
Cross-border project coordination sits in a third place again. The European Coordinators appointed for each transport corridor chair the negotiations between member states and infrastructure managers where a missing link or an unresolved bottleneck cannot be fixed by legislation alone.
The current agenda
Two files dominate the department’s rail work. The regulation on the use of railway infrastructure capacity, agreed politically in November 2025 and approved by the European Parliament in May 2026, replaces annual, national and largely manual path allocation with multiannual coordinated planning.
Implementation is deliberately slow. Individual provisions apply from 2028, and the first timetable prepared fully under the new framework takes effect in December 2030.
Alongside it sits the high-speed rail plan presented on 5 November 2025, which aims to halve journey times on many popular European routes by 2040. It commits the Commission to revising ERA’s mandate in 2026, so that redundant national rules can be removed and authorisations issued faster.