Making roads safer - Council agrees its position on reform to strengthen road infrastructure management
The EU is working to improve road safety. The Council today agreed its position on a proposal to strengthen road infrastructure management to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries.
Well-designed and properly maintained roads reduce the risk of road accidents. This reform will help the EU to progress towards its goal of halving the number of road deaths by 2020.
Norbert Hofer, Minister for Transport, Innovation and Technology of Austria
The reform will extend the scope of the current rules to motorways and other primary roads beyond the trans-European transport network (TEN-T). This will contribute significantly to the improvement of road infrastructure safety across the Union. The directive would also cover roads outside urban areas that are built using EU funding.
The proposal introduces a network-wide road safety assessment, which is a snapshot of the entire road network covered by the directive used to evaluate accident risk. Authorities will use the findings to carry out more targeted road safety inspections or take direct remedial action.
It will become mandatory to take systematic account of pedestrians, cyclists and other vulnerable road users in road safety management procedures. These road users accounted for almost half of road fatalities in the EU in 2017.