Piotr Malepszak Has Been Appointed Deputy Minister for Rail Transport in Poland

Piotr Malepszak is an expert in his field. His appointment as Deputy was therefore not a surprise.

Piotr Malepszak comes from a family of railwaymen. He graduated from the Railway Technical School in Poznań, the Higher School of Business in Warsaw, and the Higher School of Communication and Management in Poznań. He also studied at Purdue University in Indiana, USA. From 2008 to 2016, he worked in the state-owned company PKP Polskie Linie Kolejowe, which is responsible for railway infrastructure. He was, among others, the Director for Railway Construction and the Commissioner for Railway Line Revitalisation. In 2017, he moved to the regional railway of the Lower Silesia Voivodeship (Kolej Dolnośląski SA), where he was a member of the Board of Directors for technical matters until 2018.

From 2018 to 2020, he worked at CPK (Centralny Port Komunikacyjny), a company responsible for the preparation and construction of high-speed railways and a new airport in Poland. At CPK, he was more the president for the railway part of the project, and for some time, he led the whole CPK on the executive side. From the beginning, he has been associated with a generous and ambitious plan to connect Poland and Central Europe with new rail infrastructure. He was also involved in the preparation of negotiations for the inclusion of the project in the TEN-T network. In 2021, he moved closer to the now-ruling Civic Coalition and became the Mayor of Gdańsk's Commissioner for Railways. At the same time, he worked externally as a railway expert for the European Commission and the European Investment Bank.

After leaving CPK, Malepszak began to criticize PKP publicly, in the media, and on his social network X profile. In particular, he criticized how railway line modernization is carried out in Poland as inefficient. On the other hand, Malepszak remained a strong supporter of the high-speed rail project even after leaving CPK, but the total length of the planned 2000 km should be prioritized in terms of need. First to implement the lines from Warsaw via Łódź to Wrocław and Poznań and the extension of the current high-speed corridor to the Baltic Sea to the tri-cities of Gdańsk, Gdynia, Sopot.

In an interview with 300gospodarka.pl, he said that Poland does not have a comprehensive transport policy that would integrate different transport modes. The transport policy exists only on paper at the ministry, because its real implementation and the principle of sustainability are missing. Infrastructure development has focused on road transport, although the European Commission is betting heavily on rail as the basis of the Green Deal in transport. In his view, the amount of funding for rail infrastructure in Poland does not correspond to the quality of the projects being implemented.

Investments do not translate into shorter journey times on the railways, nor do they improve the parameters of infrastructure important for carriers. There are investment projects that result in oversized infrastructure that nobody needs. On the other hand, some projects have eliminated needed stations and tracks on the lines. According to Malepszak, investment and modernization planning is weak. It is often built without analysis and in an inefficient version. According to him, the priority of spending money on investments must end and the criterion of investment rationality must be brought to the fore. The priority must be regular maintenance of infrastructure, which was previously replaced by expensive investments in Poland.

 

Source: gov.pl, CPK