This is the final report of a mid-term evaluation of Directive 2004/54/EC. The Directive was intended to improve the safety of road users in tunnels by preventing critical events that might endanger human life, the environment and tunnel installations, and to reduce the consequences of accidents when they do occur. It was adopted in the wake of a number of serious road tunnel fires that caused significant loss of life. The main aim of the evaluation is to analyse how Member States have implemented the Directive 2004/54/EC, to assess whether it has served its purposes and to identify its other economic, social and environmental effects. It considers the Directive’s overall benefits and costs and looks at practices applied by Member States. The evaluation comes ten years after the Directive entered into force, at a point where the deadline for most Member States to fully implement the Directive’s requirements has passed and those Member States that secured an extension need to be making the investments required to secure compliance by the final deadline in 2019. It is an opportunity to take stock and assess the extent to which the measures specified by the Directive have been applied and the Directive’s overall objectives achieved. The study was carried out for the Directorate-General for Mobility and Transport (DG MOVE) of the European Commission (‘the Commission’) under a contract with ICF International. ICF worked in collaboration with TRT. TRT carried out the larger part of the research. The terms of reference required the contractor to address a series of evaluation questions relating to the Directive that map onto the Commission’s standard evaluation framework - addressing topics of relevance, coherence, effectiveness, efficiency, sustainability and EU added value. At the start of the study the evidence needs, the evidence-gathering approach and analytical approach required to address each evaluation question were determined. The project then moved into an evidence gathering phase that collected and reviewed: * Data on the safety equipment installed in tunnels as of 2012-2014, as determined by Member States’ reports to the Commission; * Data on accidents and fires in tunnels from 20 Member States for the 2010-2014 period; * The tunnel safety literature, making use of academic, government and others references (sources for this activity included the CIRCABC repository, the PIARC website, independent studies, datasets, research papers and presentations to international meetings and symposiums). Tunnel Managers, Administrative Authorities and tunnel safety experts in the EU, Norway, Switzerland and selected international institutions were then consulted via questionnaires that were distributed by email. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with selected stakeholders. These helped to clarify particular aspects of the implementation of the Directive and to identify good practices. Further research was carried out on five Member States (France, Germany, Greece, Italy and Slovakia) to inform the preparation case studies of the situation and impact of the Directive in these countries. (Author/publisher)
Samenvatting