Organised by Forum of European National Highway Research Laboratories (FEHRL)

This workshop provided background on the European Commission (EC)’s directives for road and tunnel safety, the perceived gaps among them, and the EC’s project that aims to address those gaps—the “Effective and Coordinated Road Infrastructure Safety Operations” (ECOROADS) project. An overview of the project was provided, including a brief history of its origins, a discussion of its goals, and a rough timeline of activities. It was emphasized that the project seeks to understand how to cover the gaps between the directives, rather than make major policy changes or merge the directives. This was followed by an overview and history of the two directives and a more detailed explanation on a central aspect of the project—the planned safety inspections on five sites, to be conducted by joint teams of road and tunnel safety experts. More detail was then provided on how the outcomes of these inspections will feed into final project deliverables. The workshop concluded with a brief discussion, focusing primarily on how the EC plans to use the outcomes of this project to inform its process for revising, expanding, or merging the directives.