This research study is intended to inform the parliamentary debate looking at the condition and the quality of road surfaces in the EU and at the trends registered in the budget assigned by EU Member States to road maintenance activities in recent years, with the aim of reviewing the economic and safety consequences of the lack of regular road maintenance. To do so, the research study aims to give the reader, both an overview of the most recent developments of academic and policy discussion in this field and a tangible perception of the current situation regarding the status of road maintenance and level of expenditure in EU Member States. The study has a number of sections and is supported by evidence gathered through 11 national case studies. The analysis is supported, where possible, by quantitative information. As road maintenance standards, practices and monitoring tools are dissimilar within Europe, the volume of quantitative data that has been gathered in Member States is not always comparable. Road Safety in Europe has been improving over recent decades. The number of fatalities in the EU-28 in 2010 was almost 31,500, or only 57% of the 54,949 fatalities registered in 2001. A significant step in this trend took place between 2008 and 2010, when road fatalities fell 10% per annum compared to 4% per annum between 2001 and 2007. Notwithstanding the substantial decline, the EU did not achieve the target, set in 2003, of a 50% decrease in road fatalities between 2001 and 2010. In addition to this general decline in road fatalities it is worth noting that: * The decline has been achieved despite a general growth in road passenger transport: between 1995 and 2011 road transport demand, measured in passenger-kilometres, grew by an average of 1.1% per annum across the EU. * The situation varies substantially across the different Member States. Southern and eastern Member States tend to have fatality rates higher than the EU average. * The decline in fatalities varies according to road users: the number of fatalities has fallen steadily for cars (-45%), goods vehicles (-40%), cyclists (-33%) and pedestrians (-34%), while the number of fatalities in accidents involving motorcycles has remained constant. * Provisional data for 2013 indicate that road fatalities are still decreasing, as an overall number of 26,000 fatalities has been registered in the EU. According to the EC press-release "Second good year in a row puts Europe firmly on track towards target"1, 2013 is the second year in a row that saw an impressive decrease in the number of people killed on Europe's roads. Based on preliminary figures, the number of road fatalities has decreased by 8% compared to 2012, following the 9% decrease between 2011 and 2012. * For the coming years, the European Commission has renewed its objective of halving fatalities by 2020 through an increased focus on the enforcement of road rules. Data on road accidents at European level are collected in CARE, the European centralised database on road accidents, which provides information on deaths or injuries across the EU, collating non-confidential data from EU Member States into one central database. Although significant steps have been made to improve the quality of the statistical information provided, the CARE database has limitations regarding both the reliability of data and the lack of information about accident causation factors. Since the adoption of the 3rd ERSAP, the EU has recognized that human error is the most recurring cause of road accidents, but the impact of road condition and maintenance is not negligible. In many circumstances, it is difficult to disentangle causality: there are accidents caused directly by the poor condition of the road, but there are also accidents caused by drivers’ behaviour in reaction to the condition or the design of the road. As drivers can, and inevitably do, make mistakes, infrastructure conditions should be gradually improved to protect users more effectively against their own shortcomings. The collection of homogeneous and accurate information on road maintenance and investment expenditure across the different Member States is difficult as the degree of homogeneity of data is minimal. Roads are administered differently in different MS, thus the responsibility for keeping the different sections of the road network at acceptable standards is assigned to numerous bodies, such as national ministries, regional or local authorities. In addition to this the definition of road maintenance and investment activities is not always clear comparing different national contexts, making it problematic to detect exactly what needs to be recorded in each of the two categories, creating discrepancies in the way data is reported across the different MS. To assess the evolution of maintenance activities on road works in the EU in recent years this study has brought together the road expenditure dataset produced by the OECD/ITF, the asphalt production data reported by EAPA and specific country information. Data collected shows that road investment levels remained relatively stable in the EU between 2006 and 2011. Road investment was at its highest in 2009, but had fallen by 7.1% by 2011. Country-specific data shows that there is a great deal of variation across EU countries in road investment expenditure registered in the 2008-2011 period. As an example Bulgaria and Poland both increased their investment expenditure over these years, whilst Slovenia, Austria and Ireland drastically reduced theirs. Road investment expenditure of the largest economies in this sample — Germany, France and the UK — did not vary substantially between 2008 and 2011. Regarding the maintenance expenditure levels, the analysis suggests the presence of a significant reduction of maintenance activities in Italy, Ireland, Slovenia and Spain in recent years and a likely downward trend also in Slovakia, Finland, Czech Republic, the UK, Portugal and Hungary. At the same time, an increase in maintenance expenditure seems to have been recorded in a number of EU MS over the same period: this is the case for Austria, Germany, France, Croatia, Lithuania, Luxemburg, and Poland. The extent to which the crisis has affected road investment and maintenance activities depends on the structure of the funding mechanism adopted in the different countries and on the political choices made by decision makers. The impact of the crisis has been higher where the funding of road infrastructure is highly dependent on government spending rather than from other sources of financing (e.g. toll roads). The status of public finance of different MS and the fiscal and budgetary choices that have been made has led to different outcomes. With the approval of Directive 2008/96/EC a common framework for road infrastructure safety management was created for the first time in the EU. Though it represents a valid step forward in the creation of a harmonised framework for road safety monitoring in the EU, this Directive only applies to the TEN-T corridors and is subject to different interpretations and dissimilar implementation across the EU. In addition to this, the Directive focuses only on procedural aspects of road safety monitoring, and it leaves room for significant variability in the operational activities undertaken by different Member States. The EU made an attempt to overcome these limits with two research projects. The first one, Pilot4safety, developed a manual, complemented by a collection of best practices that could be a starting point to develop a comprehensive tool that standardises the operational prescriptions to be implemented by road operators and national authorities in order to guarantee a balanced level of road maintenance across Europe. The second one, WhiteRoads, identified the ‘white spots’, that is road sections along the Trans-European Road Network (TEN-T) where no accidents occurred during the study period, despite high traffic flows, and studied them to identify the key features that allowed these sections to achieve such a high level of road safety. Results from the WhiteRoads project shows that good road design, the presence of adequate maintenance programmes, the installation of reliable and homogenous traffic signage and road markings and appropriate lighting are among the key aspects that determine the success of white spots. The checklist developed within the WhiteRoads project should be considered as a new and complementary tool to the safety audits and inspections laid down in the Road Infrastructure Safety Directive 2008/96/EC on the design, maintenance and management of roads and could also be applied to other relevant road sections not belonging to the TEN-T network. Several Member States have a well-established procedure for the monitoring of road conditions and the prioritisation of interventions. In many cases however, this does not extend to local or urban roads. Where road maintenance activities are carried out according to the outcomes of the monitoring process, prioritisation rules depend on the way outputs are assessed. For example while some national authorities decide to prioritise roads with the worst absolute indicators (e.g. Poland), others address the roads that are seen to be deteriorating (e.g. UK). From the case studies, a number of good practices have been identified that could help to improve the cost-effectiveness of maintenance activities on local roads such as: i) the recourse to user-fed information, where electronic or web-based systems are used to allow drivers to report potholes and highway defects directly to road managers or ii) the utilisation of recycled asphalt, a material that has the same level of quality as newly produced asphalt, but costs about 30% less. Road maintenance expenditures also yield substantial wider socio-economic impacts. The reduction in journey times associated with timely maintenance is one of the most widely recognised economic benefits of road maintenance. A survey carried out by the Asphalt Industry Association (2010) found that the average cost of poor maintenance per business, at £13,600 per year (€16,300). There is also evidence of the social cost of road accidents which has been quantified in studies in France, Lithuania and the Netherlands. While the majority of road accidents are down to driver behaviour, some of those accidents could be as a result of drivers behaving in a certain way to account for poor road maintenance. Studies that have sought to quantify the wider economic impacts of road maintenance activities indicate that the reduction in road maintenance expenditure can have an impact to the wider economy in the range of 100%-250%. When developing road safety policies and interventions, the reliability and quality of data is a key factor. There is scope across Europe for further efforts to link police collision reports to hospital data records to improve data quality and consistency, especially regarding serious injury crashes. Data quality and effective analysis are fundamental to building risk awareness and intervention effectiveness. At the same time as the degree of homogeneity of available data on road maintenance and investment expenditure across the different MS is minimal, it is important to consider additional efforts to improve the standardisation of statistical data collected across the EU. In light of future parliamentary debates on the actions to be taken by the EU to help preserve the safety and quality of road surfaces and contrast the possible negative impacts generated by cuts in road maintenance activities due to economic downturns, the following actions should be taken into consideration: * In the ongoing revision of the Road Infrastructure Safety Directive 2008/96/EC of 19th November 2008, it will be important to support the introduction of changes that allow for a more homogenous application across the EU and expand the technical and geographical scope of the application of the Directive. * Call on the Commission to propose the extension of the experiences of the WhiteRoad s project to other categories of roads and use the outcomes of the white spot evaluation to improve safety records on the most dangerous sections. * Support the dissemination of a checklist similar to those developed in WhiteRoads as a new and complementary tool to the safety audits and inspections laid down in Directive 2008/96/EC and incentivise their application on road sections off the TEN-T network. * Identify actions and measures that could focus on local and urban roads, which show the highest safety risks and, in some countries, are experiencing the strongest reduction in maintenance activities. * Help disseminating the good practices that several EU MS have introduced and could help improve the cost-effectiveness of maintenance activities across the EU. 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