Belgium Making Roads Tender

The EU is working to improve road safety. Representatives of the Romanian presidency of the Council today reached a provisional agreement with the European Parliament on a proposal to strengthen road infrastructure management to reduce road fatalities and serious injuries.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 will 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.Next stepsThe provisional agreement will have to be endorsed by the Council and the relevant European Parliament committee. It will then be formally adopted following the usual legal linguistic scrutiny.