Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2002-02-27-Speech-3-187"
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"en.20020227.13.3-187"2
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".
Thank you, Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, this House has taken the initiative of drafting a report on the repercussions of transport for health. This has been an arduous task, to which Mrs Lucas has committed herself fully, and I should like to thank her for her work.
The second initiative is intended to provide support for European cities that have committed themselves to an ambitious strategy of lasting and sustainable mobility; this is the Civitas project, for which EUR 50 million have been earmarked, to support these cities which are pioneering the quest to rationalise the use of the car in favour of greater use of public transport, not to mention the secondary initiatives designed to boost cycling or even walking.
I believe a study of the repercussions for health to be extremely important. The Commission has already made progress on developing methodologies for evaluating the impact on health and on its implementation in the Community context.
Given the need to make progress on improving methods and on carrying out pilot projects, financial resources will be made available from the new action programme for health, to develop and test the methodologies to assess the impact of transport on health. The programme is currently being discussed in the European Parliament and in the Council – to be specific, the rapporteur for the European Parliament is Mr Trakatellis – and is expected to enter into force in the near future.
Mr President, ladies and gentlemen, I have tried, by providing a few examples, to outline the way in which we are taking health matters into account in our transport policy, although I have by no means attempted to be exhaustive; for example, I would still need to mention everything that the Commission is doing in the field of air transport and health, in which, amongst other things, in addition to the initiative aimed at airlines, we are also working with these companies, precisely to safeguard the health of their passengers. All of this must be undertaken within the limits of our competences and of our resources, and taking account of the principle of subsidiarity.
The Commission remains open to any suggestion put forward by this House.
The White Paper on European transport policy for 2010 makes the citizen, the user, the very focus of our policies.
One of the objectives we put forward is simply to halve the number of fatal accidents on our roads by the year 2010; from the current total of 40 000 to less than
20 000 by that time.
I should like to highlight some of the recent measures that we have proposed to improve safety in this area, such as, for example, the directive on working times for road transport, which was recently adopted, and which will have obvious repercussions for safety.
Furthermore, the Commission has submitted various practical measures to Parliament – some will be presented shortly – and they are all intended to achieve the same objective: a change to the Regulation on driving times and rest periods, the introduction of speed limiters for small lorries, the mandatory use of seatbelts in all vehicles – particularly in coaches – or the introduction of digital tachographs.
The second factor is traffic pollution. With regard to polluting emissions from vehicles and their noise levels, we must concede that notable progress has been made. In the space of a few years, European standards have enabled us to considerably reduce this form of pollution from road traffic. We can however, improve further.
With the sixth action programme for the environment, the Commission has created an ambitious strategy to combat atmospheric pollution and its harmful effects, which is the CAFE (
programme on air quality.
Amongst the initiatives that need to be taken for the future, I should like to mention two that are perhaps the most important: the first, which I feel is of enormous significance, seeks to replace 20% of traditional fuels with alternative, cleaner fuels such as biofuels, or even hydrogen, by 2020, with an intermediate stage in which biofuels will be in use by 2010, with the ambitious objective of 5.75% of all fuels consumed in the Union being biofuels by then."@en1
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"Clean"1
"air for Europe)"1
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