The new legislation forms part of the so-called ‘road safety’ legislative package.

Main elements of the new legislation 

The revised directive aims to:

• increase compliance of non-resident drivers with additional road-safety-related traffic rules,
• streamline mutual assistance procedures between member states in the cross-border investigation of road-safety-related traffic offences, and
• strengthen the protection of fundamental rights of non-resident offenders.

The co-legislators introduced several changes to the initial Commission proposal, mainly aiming to clarify the scope and the definitions of the legal act. These entail amongst others:

• introducing the concept of the ‘concerned person’, as the person who is identified as liable for a road-safety-related traffic offence,
• clarifying the roles and responsibilities of the national contact points and the competent authorities,
• adding more offences to the revised directive, such as cases of not respecting rules on vehicle access restrictions, at a railway level-crossing or giving way to emergency service vehicles, hit-and-run cases, in addition to accepting those proposed by the Commission, such as crossing a solid line, dangerous overtaking, dangerous parking, wrong-way driving or use of overloaded vehicles,
• further clarifying the different procedures related to accessing vehicle registration data and the different options for competent authorities to ask mutual assistance with a view to making sure that the concerned person is identified, the traffic offence notice arrives to the right place within a reasonable time frame and the sanction is enforced, and
• putting in place all necessary safeguards to protect the fundamental rights of the driver or any other concerned person, including by setting a clear framework to prevent any abuse by private entities involved in the process of road-safety traffic offences and better mechanisms for the protection of personal data.

Next steps

Following today’s adoption, the legislative act will be signed by the presidents of the Council and of the European parliament and will be published in the EU’s Official Journal in the coming weeks. The revised directive will enter into force 20 days after this publication. Member states will have 30 months to transpose the provisions of the revised directive into their national legislation.

Background information

In its EU road safety policy framework 2021-2030, the Commission recommitted to the ambitious aim to get close to zero deaths and zero serious injuries on EU roads by 2050 (“Vision Zero”), as well as to the medium-term goal to reduce deaths and serious injuries by 50% by 2030. However, road fatalities were up 4% last year from 2021, according to latest Commission data. This is still 9 % below pre-pandemic level, but the pace of improvement is not sufficient to reach the above-mentioned goals.The proposal in question forms part of the ‘road safety package’, adopted by the Commission on 1 March 2023, which also comprises a new regime for driving licences and a new proposal on driver disqualifications. A provisional agreement with the European Parliament was reached on 12 March 2024.