Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2008-06-18-Speech-3-406"
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"en.20080618.29.3-406"2
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"Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, we are discussing another topic related to the safety of our citizens on Europe's roads.
Obviously, the directive will also have an important social and economic impact. It will begin a long-term process. Our aim is to change the cultural attitude to safety at the road design, construction and maintenance stages. To this extent, it is a forward-looking directive which could remain valid for the next 50 years.
Thank you again, Mr Markov, for the work you have done, and thank you again for your attention, ladies and gentlemen.
I believe that we must emphasise this issue. This afternoon I had a meeting with the officials in my Directorate-General with a view to enhancing and redoubling the Commission's efforts in the field of road safety.
The figures for the past few months are not reassuring, unfortunately, and could jeopardise the aim we have set ourselves of halving the number of victims on the roads. That is why we must press on with our work. I am delighted today that we are able to conclude another directive relating to road safety and hence the safety of all of Europe's citizens.
In the 2001 White Paper on European transport policy, spearheaded by Mrs Loyola de Palacio, the Commission put forward the ambitious goal of halving the number of lives on the roads by 2010. Parliament welcomed this initiative and has always supported it.
As I was saying, after a series of extremely positive figures in recent years, the past year's results have unfortunately not been as positive as we would have liked. Moreover, we all realise of course that the overwhelming majority of accidents are primarily caused by human error or carelessness.
Nevertheless, the state of the road network, combined with growing volumes of traffic, is often a key factor in causing accidents. The state of the road infrastructure has in fact been shown to play a determining role in one in every three accidents. For this reason, over and above initiatives geared to improving the conduct of road users and the level of vehicle safety, infrastructure ought to be the third pillar in any road safety programme based on the principle of an integrated approach.
The proposal for a directive on road infrastructure safety management offers a good combination of preventive and corrective measures. The procedures introduced by the directive seek to ensure that safety is built into the planning, design and construction phases, but also into the management and operation of the road infrastructure. The directive is not of course meant to teach civil engineers how to build roads and certainly does not constitute an incentive to construct new roads. Rather, it is a mechanism intended to extend to all Member States procedures that are already in use, sometimes in different ways. The added value of action at European level lies in extending and spreading best practice to Member States which are not yet applying it.
Mr Markov and his colleagues in the Committee on Transport have worked hard on the proposal, helping to improve its outcome. The draft text has undergone some amendments during its passage through the institutions. Many administrative obligations and requirements to forward information have been removed, in order to ease the burden of red tape. The annexes, which list the criteria to be taken into consideration for the procedures introduced by the directive, have been made non-binding. Some of the definitions have been revised so as to bring them into line with practices already existing in certain Member States. Nonetheless, the principal elements of the initial proposal have remained unchanged, so the current text is acceptable to the Commission.
Once it has been adopted, the directive will be the first European Union legislation geared to the road infrastructure as a whole; it will be an especially important and powerful tool. Allow me to recall once again that, if this directive is applied to the trans-European network, it will save more than 600 lives and prevent around 7 000 accidents every year."@en1
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