The Committee on Transport and Tourism (TRAN) votes its draft report on the Driving Licenses Directive, which is part of the Road Safety Package. The directive primarily seeks to improve the road safety through streamlined requirements for novice drivers, accompanied driving schemes as well as provisions related to physical and mental fitness. Another important goal of this piece of legislation is to improve the freedom of movement within the European Union.

Brussels

Committee on Transport and Tourism

press conference

DELLI, Karima (Greens/EFA, FR)

road safety (T)

Delivery EE2024 (T)

Press conference by Karima DELLI (Greens/EFA, FR), rapporteur after the vote on EU driving license rules

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, Thank you very much. I'm going to speaking in French. Thank you to the journalists who are following online. Ladies and gentlemen, as you will have heard, the reports on the driving licences have shown us in 2022 that there were more than 20,000 people killed on the roads of the European Union. This fatality level mainly affects young drivers, but also older people.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, The vote this morning, in the transport committee that I chair, is a vote that goes in the right direction. It reminds us that a driving licence is a tool in the service of road safety, and to do this, we've taken the recommendations from the Road Safety Authority. Of course, we also took the basis of the studies done by the European Commission experts, and we looked at the best practices across all of the Member States in Europe, and based on that, we tried to harmonise this.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, These rules will apply to motorbikes, cars, professional transport, by truck and by bus. Training, physical aptitude of the drivers are at the heart of the prevention, and we have an objective to achieve in a very short period of time. We want to have 50% fewer deaths on the road by 2030. And of course, we want to have zero serious accidents and deaths on our roads by 2050. It's simple, zero deaths on our roads. That's what we want to have.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, Looking at the current timetable, we can hope to have a first reading vote in Strasbourg in either January or February 2024. And if we come to an agreement this year, then the Member States will have three years to implement the directive. We could expect total application by 2027. That would be the best timeframe set out. And so that you can have an idea of the major advances made in the text this morning in the committee, I'll give you a couple of specific examples.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, For young drivers, the most the strictest provision on the tolerance level of alcohol in the blood or drugs will be very important action area. Tolerance level zero for drugs and reduced tolerance level for alcohol because we want to limit it to zero grams for alcohol for young drivers. But the limit adopted is .02 grams per litre of blood. There were seven countries where there wasn't any rules on this, and now we're having a limit, which will be fixed.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, Many of you will ask questions, I think, on the obligatory medical visit, and I repeat, this medical visit will be obligatory when attaining and also renewing a driving licence every 15 years. This visit affects everybody. There's no target person or target audience. It will be for young people, people who've just got their driving licence, and also older people who've just got their licence.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, Another new point as well will be obligatory training for a small scooter and category AM and A1. In this report, I've tried as far as possible to improve risk prevention, particularly for young drivers. What does the study say? Well, the younger we are without experience, the more deaths that are on our roads. More than 40% of fatalities of drivers that tend to be amongst the younger ones and also novice drivers, novice drivers for a period of two years, they will be considered to be novice drivers if they haven't had their licence for two years.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, The objective is to protect them and that's why we absolutely wanted to create, you know, this famous model, the European Disk. It's like the A that we have, I think in Belgium it's an L, you know, it's a this thing that you put in your car to show that you're a new driver. It hasn't been adopted, but we'll put it into plenary to see whether we can have some kind of same marking to put in the car across the European Union to show novice drivers.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, And there's another important point, which hasn't changed, but I'd like to remind you of it, it is the age, the minimum age to get your driver's license. There are different categories of driver's licenses. And on the minimum ages, I'd like to specify exactly what it is for permit C so for trucks, lorries, it's normally 21 years, but with professional training it will be 18. For a company driving, it is 17. We're not changing the level of professionality because we're dropping the ages. No. And for buses, that's a permit D, it's 24 and with a professional training it will be 21 everywhere in Europe and 19 in your own Member State, so at the national level.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, Driving an empty bus, that will be possible from 18 in your national Member State. An accompanied driving, well here, the Member States suggested a type of a company driving system for all drivers and if they want to, then they can drop the B permits to 17 in those cases. But that would be the Member States would have the obligation to choose this. I'd now like to come back to the questions that I'm sure you're going to ask me. Do you have any questions to ask me?

Q&A Question regarding the obligatory medical checks and the attempt to have older people renew their licenses more frequently.

SOUNDBITE (French), Karima DELLI, (Greens, FR), Rapporteur, '-

Q&A Questions about the process within the TRAN Committee and expectations for the plenary.

Q&A Questions the Parliament will vote on the legislation and about when how confident the rapporteur is that mandatory medical checks will be approved by the plenary vote and in the trialogue.

Q&A Questions about the accompanied driving scheme.