Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-04-07-Speech-1-063"
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"en.20030407.5.1-063"2
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"Madam President, ladies and gentlemen, I too would like to express my gratitude to Mr Grosch – for whom I have a high regard – for this quite excellent report. A few weeks ago, ladies and gentlemen, we discussed in this plenary the Transport White Paper and voted on what position Parliament should take in relation to it. This Transport White Paper has lofty objectives, one of the most essential of which, apart from the reduction of environmentally harmful and unhealthy emissions such as greenhouse gases and noise, is that of raising the standard of traffic safety overall. We are all aware that it does this against the backdrop of 41 000 fatal traffic accidents per annum in the European Union as a whole, to which we have to add a multitude of people injured, some being left with permanent and severe disabilities. All these things are the result of road traffic accidents.
If we really want to achieve the objective of increased safety on the roads, we need a multi-faceted strategy. Vehicles must of course be made safer, but that will be of little use unless their drivers are safer too. Those who work in the transport sector, that is, those who drive vehicles, have to be better trained. This will make manifestly superfluous the establishment of a Road Transport Safety Agency, which a majority of the plenary called for when the Transport White Paper was debated and which, I might add, I regard as absolutely nonsensical. What distinguishes the road transport sector from other transport sectors – such as sea or air transport – is the large number of people working in it.
The essential element in road transport safety, namely the way individuals drive, cannot be regulated by any one European agency, and so this draft on the training of professional drivers in goods and passenger transport is much to be welcomed. I am from the Ruhr, a densely populated region, indeed the most densely populated industrial region in the European Union, and one where there are innumerable motorways and an enormous amount of traffic. I myself travel by car a very great deal, as my electoral district is a large one, and I am also obliged to be always driving to Brussels and Strasbourg. Anyone who spends as much time travelling on motorways and other roads as I do, and as many of my fellow Members do, knows what they are like.
For example, anyone who has observed how much freight traffic by road has increased in the last three to four years alone, and how many HGVs are using the roads, will know that situations in which lives are at risk are all too frequent. This does, of course, also have to do with the central and eastern European states being about to join the European Union – in part. The drivers from our own Member States are not absolutely safe either. A very large number of vehicles from the candidate countries are already on the move right across the European Union, and there are worrying indications that the amount of goods traffic on the roads is increasing. They are worrying especially for a transit country like Germany, and that is why we need to be certain that drivers know what they are doing, to be certain that they are continuing their training, that that training is tested, and that road traffic generally is better controlled at national level. When we are, a Road Traffic Agency will become quite superfluous."@en1
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