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Speech - Dr. Dieter-Lebrecht Koch
Transport Safety
Dr. Dieter-Lebrecht Koch Enhanced transport safety is both a European and a national task that requires not only a conscious policy effort but also and in particular the participation of every single road user. The coffers of the State may be empty, but who can argue the need for greater safety on our roads when every year more than 40,000 people are killed and 1.7 million injured, some of them seriously, in traffic accidents? Indeed, each and every one of us could be the next victim. The statistics tell us not only that road accidents in the EU will cost 160 billion Euros annually, but also that at least every third European will be an accident victim once in his lifetime. In its white paper, European Transport Policy for 2010: Time to Decide, the Commission pointed out that road traffic was the most dangerous of all means of transportation. This is particularly significant given that the subjective impression is quite different and in the light of our ambitious goal: we Europeans want to cut the number of traffic fatalities by about half by 2010. A series of measures has been developed to that end, and most of those measures are reflected in the Third Road Safety Action Programme, whose appearance I welcome. The aim of the Action Programme is the transition, step by step but nevertheless as swiftly as possible, to new guidelines and rules and the review of existing ones. In my opinion, the Commission is headed in the right direction, but moving too slowly. After all, on 1 May 2004 ten more countries will join the EU, and their accident statistics are just as alarming. It is not my intention today to present the Action Programme's more than 80 recommendations, much less to evaluate them. Rather, I would like to raise a number of initiatives taken in the past few months. As the rapporteur for my group, I was able substantially to influence the framework Directive for pedestrian-friendly car fronts. As a result, substantial progress has been made towards short-term goals, such as the strict prohibition of bull bars, and towards long-term requirements adopted for the automobile industry, such as the technical development of daytime running lights, the elimination of the blind spot in the rear view mirror, the introduction of active and passive safety components, and so on. I am from Thüringen, the German Land that just a few weeks ago opened Germany's longest but also said to be safest highway tunnel. In spite of this, many drivers feel psychologically oppressed when driving through the tunnel. I was pleased when the Commission launched its draft Directive on Tunnel Safety, which basically corresponds to the Third Action Programme of which I approve. But I was also concerned, for I anticipated that the Directive would lead to excessive amounts of red tape and consequently place a heavy cost burden on Member States. Tunnels are not, after all, among the Community's most accident-prone stretches of road. My mind is now at ease. The European Parliament has been able to amend the proposed Directive and make it more precise and concrete; the Directive has been restructured, the amount of red tape reduced and more flexible technical provisions introduced. Essential safety components have not come to grief in the process. Quite the contrary. By taking account, for example, of the safety-specific interests of the disabled, the Directive enhances those components in a meaningful and, in the European Year of People with Disabilities, quite appropriate way. All that remains to be done is to incorporate those components into domestic law as soon as possible and thereby enable them to have a positive tangible impact on our road users - psychologically and in reality! Another topic that was and still is on the agenda concerns seatbelts and retention systems for children in all categories of motor vehicles. Recent accident research has proven that 50% of all passengers killed in road accidents were not belted in. I come from a part of a country in which child seats and child retention systems didn't even exist 13 years ago, and in which automatic seatbelts were luxurious extras delivered after a 10-15 year wait. Development work has not reached an end. Today's belts and retention systems were developed for safety, comfort, use and production exclusively in terms of the test results in cases of front-end collisions and almost always perform satisfactorily in such cases. In side collisions, however - and almost 70% of all child fatalities result from side collisions - these systems often fail. Sideways-facing seats in buses also call for further technical developments. I would like to conclude by mentioning the efforts to standardize certain social provisions relating to road traffic. These efforts are prompted not only by safety considerations but also by competition-related aspects. They are therefore key to solving the problems posed by competitors from the new Member States that undercut the market. The pace of development in the field of active and passive road traffic safety has picked up, with good results in a process that is far from over. We must nevertheless not lose sight of the fact that in the future steps must be taken to: 1. promote responsible conduct by road users; |
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