Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2003-01-14-Speech-2-046"
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"en.20030114.2.2-046"2
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"Mr President, Commissioner, in the plenum we value your presence in the debates of the Committee on Regional Policy, Transport and Tourism.
The fundamental axis of this report is road safety. As some honourable Members have said, lack of safety leads to 40 000 deaths and 1 750 000 injuries per year in the European Union. And there is great consensus on the part of all the groups with regard to the need to achieve the objective of safety.
But here the differences begin, and we are producing proposals which will give the Council work, because the Council will have to take a position on many points on which in this House we are naturally not going to achieve unanimity.
Specifically, we are talking about one of the factors of safety. It is true that there are technological factors, there are infrastructure factors, there are many agents involved in the question of safety or lack of safety, but I believe we must focus on the essential factor, the human factor, the driver in this case.
On the basis of Mr Markov’s proposals, and with his cooperation, the report has developed, leading to greater flexibility for the driver, because it is the driver who is aware of levels of tiredness at any given moment and it must be they who call the shots in terms of rests and the distribution of working time.
There is a gremlin which creeps into all these debates and that is that sometimes this flexibility can be used by the transport company to counter the driver’s capacity to decide. If this were the case, the system of controls on companies would have to be extremely strict, since we are talking about risking lives, in particular that of the drivers themselves.
We are also talking about a very important European small or medium-sized enterprise, the transport enterprise, which we must promote and whose competitiveness we must defend. And we are talking about a transport problem in a Europe which is not equal, a Europe which has peripheral areas for which transport has an importance which is different to that of central areas.
I believe that this report has important objectives, but we must continue to work on it until we reach a consensus."@en1
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