Road infrastructure safety management: improving the safety performance of road infrastructure

PURPOSE: to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries on EU road networks by improving the safety performance of road infrastructure.

PROPOSED ACT: Directive of the European Parliament and of the Council.

ROLE OF THE EUROPEAN PARLIAMENT: the European Parliament decides in accordance with the ordinary legislative procedure and on an equal footing with the Council.

BACKGROUND: the EU’s strategic objective of the Union is to halve the number of road deaths by 2020 compared to 2010 and to move close to zero fatalities by 2050 (Vision Zero). However, progress towards achieving these objectives has stalled in recent years. The number of people killed on the roads has certainly been divided by more than two since 2001. However, in 2017, 25 300 people lost their lives on EU roads and 135 000 were seriously injured.

Directive 2008/96/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council on road infrastructure safety management aims to ensure that road safety considerations are at the forefront of all phases of road infrastructure planning, design and operation. However, there are considerable differences in the way in which the Directive is implemented by Member States; many high-performing countries going beyond the requirements of the Directive while others are lagging behind.

This proposal forms part of the new EU road safety policy framework 2020-2030. It is part of the third mobility package and complements the process started with the 2016 low emission mobility strategy and the previous ‘Europe on the move’ packages published in May and November 2017.

IMPACT ASSESSMENT: the combination of options selected could save over 3 200 lives and avoid more than 20 700 serious injuries in 2020-2030 relative to the baseline (14 650 lives saved and 97 502 serious injuries avoided in 2020-2050). For 2030 alone, road infrastructure measures would result in 562 lives saved and 3 675 serious injuries avoided.

CONTENT: the Commission proposes to amend Directive 2008/96/EC in order to (i) improve the follow-up on the findings of road infrastructure safety management procedures; (ii) encourage the sharing of knowledge between Member States on these procedures and requirements; (iii) protect vulnerable road users; (iv) improve the deployment of new technologies; and (v) work towards a uniformly high level of road safety in the Member States.

Specifically, the amending proposal:

• extends the scope of the Directive beyond the trans-European transport network (TEN-T) to cover motorways and primary roads outside the network as well as all roads outside urban areas that are built using EU funds in whole or in part;
• obliges Member States to properly implement and follow-up of all the road infrastructure safety management procedures (RISM Directive);
• makes it mandatory to apply the procedures of Directive 2008/96/EC to any road infrastructure project outside urban areas which is completed using Union funding should ensure that Union funds are not used to build unsafe roads;
• introduces a network-wide road assessment, a systematic and proactive risk mapping procedure to assess the ‘in-built’, or inherent, safety of roads across the EU. This new procedure takes into account historic accident data and the existence of already identified high accident concentration sections;
• specifies Member States' reporting requirements with regard to the application and results of road infrastructure safety management procedures and requires Member States to rank their road networks according to the level of risk identified in network-wide road assessments;
• requires joint road safety inspections of the transition areas between the roads covered by this Directive and the road tunnels covered by Directive 2004/54/EC;
• setting general performance requirements for road markings and road signs to make it easier to roll out cooperative, connected and automated mobility systems; and
• making it mandatory to systematically take vulnerable road users into account in all road safety management procedures.