Carriage of goods by road: statistical returns. Recast

The Commission presented a report on the implementation of Regulation (EU) No 70/2012 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 January 2012 on statistical returns in respect of the carriage of goods by road.

This report outlined the background, policy context and coverage of the legislation, and discusses its implementation, the statistical results and their publication. It then outlined possible future developments.

Implementation of the Regulation: the main conclusion of the report was that the implementation of Regulation (EU) No 70/2012 has had a broadly positive impact, enabling rapid production of comparable, high-quality results.

The Regulation has proven indispensable for producing national and EU road freight statistics and avoiding duplication of work. The statistics are regularly used in monitoring and assessing road freight transport policies at national and EU level.

Publishing the data has raised their visibility and provided a better return on the investment of resources.

The main statistical results have highlighted the following trends:

• road transport remains the most important mode of goods transport. In terms of tonne-km, it accounts for more than 70% of all inland transport modes, this share being relatively stable over the last decade;
• national transport by domestic hauliers represents almost two thirds of total freight transport by road. National transport performed by foreign hauliers accounts for about 1.5% of total road freight transport and for about 2% of total national road freight transport;
• the cabotage penetration rate, which measures the share of foreign hauliers in the national road freight transport market for hire and reward, was 2.3% in 2012. It has recently grown somewhat, in particular following the lifting of transitional restrictions on hauliers from the countries that joined the EU in 2004 and 2007;
• in terms of tonnes transported, the major product groups carried in the Member States were mining and quarrying products (26% of the total in 2012), other non-metallic mineral products (14%), food, beverages and tobacco (12%) and agricultural products (9%).

Despite cabotage’s relatively small share of road transport operations overall, the Commission considered that there is a need to further improve the quality of the relevant statistics.

Administrative burden: Eurostat makes considerable efforts to help Member States implement the Regulation and produce high-quality statistics: it has developed an information system, and introduced communication methods that minimise the data management burden for the reporting countries.

In addition, it is continuously adapting its validation rules to make them more practical and efficient for data checking and processing and so help Member States reduce the reporting burden of both respondents and administrations.

Efforts to reduce the burden on respondents while increasing the response rate and data quality will continue. Several new fields of action have been identified, such as:

• developing the existing data reporting mechanisms;
• using electronic toll systems to complement and benchmark survey results and improve data quality;
• further exploiting available data to model transport flows and set parameters useful for transport policy and modelling, such as average load factors by transport type, or distance class;
• making the survey results more useful for: (i) evaluating market opening, transport efficiency, road transport market trends and the modal split; (ii) producing more detailed statistics on greenhouse gas emissions from road transport.

Developing the legal basis of the Regulation: ways of addressing new data needs arising from policy developments without significantly increasing the reporting burden have been identified. These may include: (i) a data collection on energy consumption in road freight transport; (ii) mandatory collection of data on ‘empty journeys’.