The initiative will increase the availability of infrastructure through better planning and allocation processes, and improved cross-border coordination. The proposed regulation builds upon the rail sector's work on new processes and tools to plan and manage rail infrastructure capacity. It introduces a comprehensive capacity-planning phase, which allows all relevant stakeholders to signal their capacity needs and helps infrastructure managers identify capacity deficiencies and inconsistencies in the planning for cross-border trains at an early stage. This process allows infrastructure managers to act proactively and optimise the use of capacity by earmarking capacity for different rail market segments, different train profiles and different flexible allocation methods, instead of relying on a purely demand-driven approach.