A single day annual conference on traffic safety on roads was organized, for the second consecutive year, in the city of Prague on 1 March 2010 by the European Association of Operators of Toll Road Infrastructures (ASECAP) in cooperation with Kapsch Telematic Service (Czech Republic). The conference was held after the regular session of the ASECAP Management Board, and after the ASECAP assembly meeting.

Some seventy participants took part in the conference entitled “Coordination & Cooperation: the pace in European road safety”.

Interested participants were invited to discuss the forthcoming EU road safety action program, and to appreciate the best and most innovative practices in the field of motorway management.

ASECAP is the European Association of tolled road infrastructure operators. It gathers together twenty national members managing more than 40,000 km of road networks. ASECAP’s mission is to promote tolling and the direct user-payer principle as the most efficient tool to finance the construction, safe operation and effective maintenance of motorways and other major road infrastructure facilities.

ASECAP and its members all over Europe committed themselves in 2004, bysigning the Charter “25,000 lives to save”, that they will do all that they possibly can to increase traffic safety on motorways and reduce the number of fatalities by 50 %.

That is why ASECAP presented to the EU institutions, national authorities and transport stakeholders the outstanding results achieved in the 2000 - 2010 decade by its members.

Many members, toll motorway concessionaires, have fully met the 50 % road fatalities reduction target set by the European Commission, and some were even more successful, despite the increase of their network and the overall number of km travelled! In the period of less than ten years, from 2002 till 2008 the number of fatalities, managed according to the EU Plan, was reduced by 47 % in Austria, 49 % in France and even 62 % in Spain.

Significant achievements in traffic safety on motorways are the result of the best engineering practices in terms of research, design, maintenance and operation, and were made possible on tolled road network and under PPP schemes, where the collected revenues are reinvested in road infrastructure so as to make it safer, environment-friendly, and properly equipped with intelligent transport systems.

Mr. Enrico Grillo-Pasquarelli, Director for Inland transport of the new DG MOVE (formerly DG TREN - Directorate-General for Energy & Transport) warmly praised the role played by the concessionaires’ sector and by ASECAP, a professional and reliable partner of the European Commission. He then presented the main drivers behind the 4th Road Safety Action Programme that will be launched in May. The focus of the future EU strategy will be set on the weakest elements of the traffic safety chain: behaviour of users (education and training), vulnerable users, secondary networks, enforcement of existing rules, and on the improvement of situation in Member States that have achieved less good results in terms of traffic safety.

M. Kaas, Deputy Minister for Transport of the Czech Republic, highlighted the importance of the future EU strategy and informed the participants on the Czech ambitious safety programme that places a particular attention on prevention, both in terms of supervision of the design and engineering phases, and on education of users and information campaigns.

Reiterating ASECAP’s strong support to the European Commission’s action, K. Dionelis, ASECAP Secretary General, underlined the need to develop reliable statistics, clear and unambiguous common definitions, and sound data collection mechanisms. He therefore called the EU executives to address the right objectives and set a particular focus on inappropriate users’ behaviour, secondary roads and on the urban dimension, where most of the accidents occur.

In this perspective, ASECAP is ready to share its expertise and put the experience of its members at the service of the European institutions and citizens, and to contribute in this way to saving even more lives in the decade to come.

Presentations from the Safety Event are available here under:

Implementation of EU Directives:

Best Practices:

Prospective: “An integrated approach to safety: the stakeholders’ commitment”

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