The Swedish Presidency of the Council of the European Union is preparing negotiations on the deployment of Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS), with a view to the second inter-institutional negotiation meeting, scheduled for Thursday 8 June. According to a preparatory document dated Friday 2 June and obtained by EUROPE, it invited the Member States’ ambassadors to the EU (Coreper) to approve a revised negotiating mandate.
The aim of this text is to make essential ITS mandatory throughout the EU and to solve the problems related to the lack of interoperability and continuity of existing applications and services.
An initial inter-institutional negotiation meeting was held in December under the previous Czech Presidency. According to a European source contacted by EUROPE on Tuesday 6 June, the next trilogue should be conclusive. “Talks are quite advanced at a technical level and it seems the main sticking point relates to the implementation framework (comitology procedure and empowering the Commission to make decisions on implementation), where the European Parliament’s position is much closer to that of the European Commission”, explained this source.
The Swedish Presidency is expected to receive a revised mandate on Wednesday 7 June, at the Coreper meeting.
During the technical meetings, proposals were made for changes to the directive’s annexes, in particular with regard to the deadlines and geographical scope of Member States’ obligations, and the different types of data (see EUROPE 13171/12). Data types have been grouped into a larger number of sub-categories, enabling a targeted and progressive approach.
According to the document, some delegations are reluctant to accept that amendments going beyond the completion of Annex III, in cases where deadlines have yet to be set, should be made by means of delegated acts. Others, on the other hand, are prepared to accept delegated acts with a broader scope in order to retain the desired flexibility in the system, or consider that some of the guarantees are not necessary.
The Swedish Presidency is concerned that the European Parliament is asking for a more ambitious scope for certain types of data in terms of geographical scope or time limits.
At the technical meeting in May, the parliamentary representatives explained that their main concerns were speed limits, static information on the state of the network, dynamic data on safe and secure parking areas and multimodal access nodes.
Parliament also questioned the approach - applied to both static and dynamic data types - of limiting the obligation to roads and streets in urban nodes where traffic flow has reached a threshold of 8,500 vehicles per day on average. If a threshold is necessary, it should be lower, particularly for towns in urban nodes.
Read the preparatory documents: https://aeur.eu/f/79b ; https://aeur.eu/f/79c (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)