Aiming at improving traffic flow and road safety at the same time, the heavy goods vehicle overtaking ban is one of the measure that enable to increase the acceptance of heavy goods vehicles by other road users. Enforced over distances of several kilometres and on highly trafficked roads, a lotremains to investigate on the impact of the measure on traffic conditions. Since the end of the 90's, many experiments have been undertaken, especially in Europe. In some countries, the overtaking bans have gone beyond the experimental stage and have been implemented as long term traffic measures. However, not all countries are familiar with the overtaking ban. Paying a lot of attention to the evaluations made by other countries, a synthesis seems to be wished, hence this paper. Probing the available data from Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United-Kingdom and France, the effects of the ban on many parameters (speeds, flows, headways,etc.) are analyzed, in order to characterize the quantitative impact of the measure on traffic conditions. For that purpose, traffic conditions from the experiments, before and after the implementation of the ban, are compared. A general overview on the most frequent advantages and drawbacks is also given. The different data are then used to determine an average impact of the ban on traffic conditions. From this result, the author attempts to achieve a cost-benefit analysis of the effects of the heavy good vehicle overtaking ban, which basically intends to be a useful tool to assist decision-making asfor using the measure or not. For the covering abstract see ITRD E145999
Abstract