Eight member states have written to Internal Market and Industry Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska urging the European Commission to speed up its review of European road safety laws – general safety regulation (GSR) – so that it might come forward with a proposal “well before the end of 2017”.
The letter, sent on 3 February and made public on Thursday 9, was signed jointly by the transport ministers of Austria, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Italy, Ireland, Netherlands and Belgium. Their call relates to the current review being carried out on Regulation 661/2009 on type-approval requirements for the general safety of motor vehicles and Regulation 78/2009 on type-approval of motor vehicles with regard to the protection of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users.
They call for “mandatory fitment at EU-level” of innovative technologies and policies to accelerate fleet renewal, for both light and heavy vehicles. This, they argue, would increase market penetration for new technologies (for example, connected vehicles, indirect alert devices, and designing vehicles to be safer). The objective in the medium term is to cut the number of road death by half by 2020.
The raft of measures presented by the European Commission in December of last year for improving the safety of cars and lorries disappointed the European Council on transport safety (see EUROPE 11696).
Road safety is a matter of national as well as European concern: the number of deaths on Europe’s roads, after falling dramatically in the 1990s and 2000s, has remained stubbornly stable for a number of years (see EUROPE 11281). In 2015, some 26,000 people lost their lives on European roads and around 135,000 were seriously injured, the eight member states highlight in their letter. (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)