This report presents the overall results of the comparative study of road traffic rules and corresponding enforcement actions in the Member States of the European Union. The main objective of this study is twofold: to provide information and to make a comparative analysis of road traffic rules and corresponding enforcement in the Member States of the European Union (EU15). In the data collection and respective integrated analysis two complementary perspectives were combined: 1) A top down perspective, covering aspects of the legal, organisational and regulatory frameworks for road traffic rules and enforcement; 2) A bottom up perspective, covering the detail of the rules and respective enforcement for each topic of interest included in the study (46 topics in total). The selection of the topics was carried on considering that the set of topics had to be sufficiently broad to serve the main purpose of this study, i.e. a wide inventory of road traffic rules. Topics that are either far away from EU competencies or that do not have the potential to present interesting ‘best practices’ are not included. Topics are aggregated by themes in order to enable a systematic approach in the data collection, analysis, and structured presentation of the results. Driving requirements, professional transport, road characteristics, safety equipment, traffic rules and vehicle characteristics are the six themes used in the aggregation of the topics of interest. The objective of the country level analysis (i.e., the top down perspective) is to capture wide scope aspects not easily perceived through the individual analysis of the rules. In fact, if one aims having a complete overview on the traffic law and enforcement systems it is necessary to go beyond the simple sum of the information collected for each topic of interest. For instance, the values of the maximum and minimum fines that are applied in a country, in case of infringement to road code provisions, are not easily perceived only by the looking to a given set of infractions (for instance , related with speeding, overtaking, etc.). The same argument is also valid for the feedback loop of information in the system. Moreover, understanding national frameworks and structures for traffic law and its enforcement is also a basic need for understanding the specific information analysed at ‘topic’ level. The analysis of signs and signals are also treated within this part of the analytical work. The complete set of country reports is presented in annex. (Author/publisher)
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