A good week for ECF and cycling road safety at the TRAN Committee in the European Parliament

12 Oct, 2017
Twitter Facebook LinkedIn

A good week for ECF at the Transport and Tourism(TRAN) committee which is responsible for transport issues within the European Parliament, has been dealing with vehicle safety and professional driver training.

Two issues of interest, first is a report that the TRAN committee has initiated itself on road safety and vehicle technologies. This comes at a time when the European Commission is preparing an overhaul of the safety type approval for all new vehicles[1] (ECF documents here[2])

ECF is extremely pleased to inform that the position we advocated for towards the rapporteur and the shadow rapporteurs were largely taken on board, making it an excellent basis for the Commission to include ground-breaking vehicle safety technologies in its forthcoming proposal. Congratulations have to go to MEP Dieter-Lebrecht Koch the rapporteur, the chair of the committee MEP Karima Delli and the shadow rapporteurs MEPs, Olga Sehnalová, Kosma Złotowski, Jens Rohde, Kateřina Konečná, Rolandas Paksas, and of course cyclists friend MEP Michael Cramer.

The report calls for;

  • Intervening Intelligent Speed Assistance (ISA) in all new cars
  • Autonomous Emergency Braking (AEB) in all new cars for possible crashes with pedestrians and cyclists
  • Better Direct Vision around HGV cabs
  • HGV active safety systems
  • Better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians

This also still has to be confirmed at the plenary level but there shouldn’t be any changes. We will update you after the plenary vote with the actual full public text. This will be an excellent incentive for the Commission to include all these ground-breaking vehicle safety technologies

In the meantime there’s nothing to stop you thanking the rapporteurs and shadow rapporteurs who dealt with the file within the committee[3] (footnoted), and here is the list of the whole of the TRAN committee MEPS who all contributed and voted for the report, you can see which one is in your region so you know who to thank in your area http://www.europarl.europa.eu/committees/en/tran/members.html

Secondly is the updating the Initial Qualification and Periodic Training of Drivers of Certain Road Vehicles for the Carriage of Goods or Passengers and Driving Licences Directive (unfortunately they are not updating the catchy name). This piece of legislation lays out the basis for providing training programmes for professional drivers, including importantly the Driver Certificate of Professional Competence (Driver CPC) qualification for professional bus, coach and lorry drivers. We thought the current legislation was a bit light on road safety and absent of acknowledgement of requiring drivers to understand the needs of cyclists and pedestrians.

The Directive is quite light and allows a lot of leeway for Member States to interpret and implement the training nuts and bolts. However Annex 1 of the Directive states that

“The  knowledge  to  be  taken  into  account  by Member  States  when establishing  the  driver's  initial qualification and periodic training must include at least the subjects in this list”

This is all ongoing but had a good milestone this week with the European TRAN committee approving the original Commission proposal[4], which has this week been endorsed by the TRAN Committee with one or two amendments[5], and still specifically mention cycling and pedestrians to be taken into account within training procedures for all lorry, bus and coach drivers. This still has to go through the Parliament plenary, and of course the Council (Member States) have to agree but it is looking good for cycling safety and HGV driver training. (ECF Position paper here https://ecf.com/sites/ecf.com/files/ECF_Position_Paper_on%20Prof_Drivers_Qual_Dir.pdf

We will update you with how we progress on this.

 

Contact the author

Ceri  Woolsgrove's picture
Senior Policy Officer - Road Safety and Technical

Contact Us

Avenue des Arts, 7-8
Postal address: Rue de la Charité, 22 
1210 Brussels, Belgium

Phone: +32 2 329 03 80