European Parliament pushes for safe and secure trucker facilities with revised TEN-T regulations.

The European Parliament’s Transport Committee has recently voted to revise the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) regulations to better accommodate Europe’s truck drivers, who have been described as “abandoned”. The revision aims to impose binding deadlines on the construction and opening of safe and secure parking sites across the European road network. This is a significant step forward for the European Road Hauliers Association, which has been campaigning for better facilities for drivers.

According to European Road Hauliers Association Secretary General Marco Digioia, safe and secure parking is part of the solution to addressing the escalating driver shortage across Europe. Last year, the driver shortage was at half a million, and the International Road Transport Union (IRU) has said that this number is on course to increase by 40% this year. If this happens, some 14% of haulage moves would go unfulfilled.

IRU Director of EU Advocacy Raluca Marian is happy to see the committee’s desire to improve the conditions of rest areas is fuelled by a sense of urgency. The EU’s road transport sector is lacking hundreds of thousands of drivers, and two million driver positions are forecast to be unfilled by 2026 if things don’t change. Therefore, it is important to make the driver profession more attractive by improving their working conditions.

Read more about this in the article at The Loadstar.