A group of European cities and regions, including six major capitals, has called on their national governments to make sure that ongoing negotiations on Direct Vision safety regulations for trucks and buses are ambitious enough.

“Cycling and walking are key pillars of sustainable and healthy transport”, says the group in a letter, emphasising the need to protect the lives of cyclists and pedestrians with the new regulation, which could potentially “greatly improve road safety, particularly for vulnerable road users”.'

The letter was sent by Eurocities and Polis, two organisations representing cities at the European level, on behalf of Berlin, Copenhagen, Lisbon, London, Malmö, Osnabrück, Paris, Region Stockholm, Valencia and the Swedish Cycling Cities network to their respective national governments.

An ambitious Direct Vision standard for trucks

The group points out that trucks represent 2% of vehicles on the road but are involved in around 15% of road fatalities. Around 3,300 people were killed in collisions involving Heavy Goods Vehicles in the EU in 2018, nearly 1,000 of those being cyclists, pedestrians and motorcyclists. Many of these fatalities resulted from so-called blind-spot crashes, where the driver does not see the cyclist or pedestrian. Today’s trucks have deadly blind spots, and there are currently no standards in place to regulate the Direct Vision of trucks.

Direct Vision is what drivers can see directly through the windows of their vehicle. This is different to Indirect Vision, which is what a driver sees on a monitor or in a mirror. Seeing something “directly” has been proven to increase reaction speeds and stopping distances of around 5 meters for a vehicle travelling at 25 km/h. 5 meters of additional travel before stopping can be the difference between life and death.

In 2019, the EU passed Regulation (EU) 2019/2144, which mandates vehicle manufacturers to include several safety measures in their vehicles, including better Direct Vision for trucks. Manufacturers will be required to improve their direct vision “by reducing to the greatest possible extent the blind spots in front of and to the side of the driver”.

Currently, work is ongoing at the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE) to establish the technical guidelines that will be used to implement the Direct Vision standard required for all new types of vehicle by 2026 and all new vehicles by 2029.

ECF has been attending these technical working groups along with other safety and environmental NGOs and can attest to considerable pushback from the automotive industry, which is trying to base the specifications on some of the worst-performing trucks currently on the market, often modelled on vehicle designs from the 1980s.

As changes like these only come around every ten years or so, new legislation that’s based on the designs of today’s worst-performing trucks would mean we would still have poor vision until the 2030s or later. This would effectively lock in weak, unambitious vision standards for a whole generation. With all the deadly risks this poses for cyclists and pedestrians.

The letter can be found here.

The press release from Eurocities and POLIS can be found here.