The Committee on Transport and Tourism adopted the report by Daniela AIUTO (EFDD, IT) on the proposal for a directive of the European Parliament and of the Council amending Directive 2008/96/EC on road infrastructure safety management.
As a reminder, the proposal makes amendments to Directive 2008/96 / EC to reduce the number of people who are killed or seriously injured on the road networks of the European Union by improving road safety performance.
The committee recommended that the position of the European Parliament adopted at first reading in the framework of the ordinary legislative procedure amend the Commission proposal as follows.
Members considered that the Directive should apply to roads which are part of the trans-European network, motorways and primary roads, including sections of road built on bridges and sections of road that pass through tunnels whether they are at the design stage, under construction or in operation.
Member States should, in particular:
- ensure that road users are informed of the existence of any section with a high concentration of accidents, and that adequate signage and marking are put in place to warn road users when road works are carried out on road sections and may therefore jeopardise their safety;
- ensure that joint road safety inspections are sufficiently frequent to ensure adequate safety levels, but in any case carried out at least every three years;
- ensure adequate levels of intervention and maintenance to guarantee the safety of the infrastructure on the whole road network and shall put in place procedures and plans to intervene immediately if the findings of the inspections and of the network-wide road assessment highlight a severe safety risk;
- prepare and regularly update, but within a year at the latest after the entry into force of the Directive, a risk-based prioritised action plan to track the implementation of identified remedial action;
- ensure that appropriate information is provided at the starting point of each section of the road network in order to inform the road users on the current category of the section;
- publish and make accessible to the public all the relevant documents, affecting the safety of the infrastructure, of concession provisions within the framework of public procurements;
- establish a national system for the purpose of voluntary reporting accessible on-line to all road users, to facilitate the collection of details of occurrences transmitted by road users and vehicles, and of any other safety-related information which is perceived by the reporter as an actual or potential hazard to road infrastructure safety.
The Commission, on its part, should:
- set up guidelines for the provision and maintenance of “forgiving roadsides” and “self-explaining and self-enforcing roads” in the initial audit of the design phase, building on the experience of all Member States;
- publish guidelines to define a methodology to carry out systematic network-wide road assessments and inspections of high risk sections;
- develop minimum performance requirements to facilitate the recognition of road markings and road signs and to improve their connectivity and their interoperability with C-ITS devices installed on connected and automated vehicles;
- by 2020, establish common European standards to harmonise road markings and road signs, in line with the provisions of the Vienna Convention on Road Signs and Signals of 1968’
- establish a central European register for all road signs and additional symbols used in the EU;
- consider revising the Directive 2004/54/EC on minimum safety requirements for tunnels by 2021 and should consider adopting a new legislative proposal on minimum safety requirements for bridges.
Members also stressed the need to develop quality requirements for infrastructure for pedestrians and cyclists and to identify, at EU level, level crossings that pose a high risk to safety in order to invest in improving them.