Road safety law faces MEP opposition

A draft law on road safety is likely to be watered down following calls from a centre-right MEP, Renate Sommer, for the entire proposal to be scrapped.

MEPs will vote on the proposal, known as the road infrastructure safety management directive, next week (26 February). The European Commission's proposal aims to ensure that road safety is taken into account by road planners on all Trans-European Transport Networks (TEN-T) and argues that it could save 1,300 lives every year.

But centre-right MEPs dispute these figures and argue that the proposal is too bureaucratic. Renate Sommer, a German EPP-ED member of the Parliament's transport committee, has put forward an amendment calling on the committee to reject the proposal.

Last year, Sommer presented a similar amendment, which led to the committee rejecting the proposal by a majority of one. Sommer said: "We don't need more bureaucracy...I'm convinced that it is much more important to have more police on the street [enforcing traffic law]." The MEP said that she was not certain of winning a vote again given the narrow margin, but said that she was convinced that she could win her "fallback position" of diluting the law through amendments to make it non-binding.

A Parliament source said a compromise was likely, adding: "The law only makes sense with binding annexes, but non-binding annexes are better than nothing."

Figures published this week (19 February) by the European Transport Safety Council show that Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK have the safest motorways in the EU, while Slovenia and Hungary have the most dangerous.

A draft law on road safety is likely to be watered down following calls from a centre-right MEP, Renate Sommer, for the entire proposal to be scrapped.