Road safety is an important topic in the EU’s partnership with pre-accession and neighbouring countries. These include states in the Western Balkans – Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, North Macedonia, Kosovo, Montenegro and Serbia – and Eastern Partnership countries – Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova and Ukraine.

Both regions have taken important steps towards better road safety, including setting up national road safety bodies, adopting ambitious reduction targets and greater regional cooperation. However, they have almost twice the rate of road fatalities as the EU. In 2017, there were 81 deaths on Western Balkan roads per million inhabitants and in 2016, 97 deaths per million inhabitants in the Eastern Partnership countries (the EU’s latest figure is 49).

Concrete action

In April 2018, Ministers of Transport in Western Balkan and Eastern Partnership countries endorsed respectively their regional road safety declaration on the initiative of the European Commission. This reaffirms existing commitments and provides political support for targets, regional cooperation and exchange of best practices.

Independently, all Eastern Partnership countries have set up national road safety coordinating bodies and have a road safety strategy and action plan. In June 2019, a joint declaration on transport cooperation by the EU and the Eastern Partnership region reaffirmed commitments to safe roads.

Meanwhile, Western Balkans countries aim to close the road safety gap between them and the EU. To achieve this ambitious goal, a three-year road safety inspection regional plan was developed with technical advice and funding from the Commission’s Technical Assistance for the Connectivity Agenda for the Western Balkans (CONNECTA). The resulting improvements to over 300 km of the TEN-T road network are due to start in late 2019, funded through the Western Balkan Investment Framework.

For future action, a Technical Committee for Road Safety under the Permanent Secretariat of the Transport Community – comprising the EU and Western Balkans countries – is developing a comprehensive road safety action plan, due at the end of 2019.

The World Bank is an important partner for road safety in the region. It provides substantial loans for road infrastructure upgrades and other projects and leads expert working groups where partners exchange knowledge and expertise, funded by the European Commission.

The Bank contributed to a regional road safety road map that was the basis for the April 2018 declaration (see above) and to a TEN-T network Investment Plan by 2030 for Eastern Partnership countries.

A next step for the Eastern Partnership countries is a regional road safety observatory. This will collect quality data for effective road safety policies and measures, and support cooperation and exchange of best practices.