At their Council meeting in Luxembourg on Tuesday 18 June, the European transport ministers unanimously adopted their negotiating position (‘general approach’) on the revised directive on river information services (see EUROPE 13429/6).
“This text aims to guarantee the availability of data from river information services in order to facilitate the integration of inland waterway transport into the multimodal chain”, explained Georges Gilkinet, Belgian Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Minister for Mobility, during the public debate.
The main change made by the Council is a reduction in scope. The Council would like the directive to continue to apply only to inland waterways and ports that are part of the trans-European transport network (TEN-T) and are directly linked to the inland waterways and ports of another State.
The grievance mechanism proposed by the Commission has been removed from the text, as it is considered too prescriptive. The transposition deadline has been extended from one to three years after the entry into force of the amended directive.
Magda Kopczyńska, Director General for Mobility and Transport at the European Commission, expressed reservations and would like to see “a more courageous approach”. She fears that these changes will reduce the overall effectiveness of the measures. In terms of the scope, “this is a step away from promoting intermodality”, she felt, pointing out that cargo transported on rivers does not stop at inland ports, but moves on to another destination using other modes of transport.
“We need to move away from the old idea of the directive that was only focused on facilitating cross-border traffic and focus on improving the efficiency of inland waterway transport as a whole, promoting multimodality and modal shift as well as advancing digitalisation”, she argued.
She also regretted the removal of the complaints mechanism. “We must ensure that skippers and other users of these services can benefit from a minimum guarantee of protection and a simple, coordinated way of handling any complaints they may have”, she said.
Interinstitutional negotiations with the new European Parliament can begin under the Hungarian Presidency of the EU Council, which starts on Monday 1 July.
Read the general approach: https://aeur.eu/f/cpp (Original version in French by Anne Damiani)