CORTE to submit remarks to the Road Package

During the recent meeting that took place in October this year, the CORTE confederation debated, among others, on the final shape of EU road transport changes, commonly known as the Road Package. During the meeting, CORTE members have worked out more than 20 amendments aimed at unifying planned changes in legislation.

In October, another congress of CORTE (Confederation of Organizations in Road Transport Enforcement) took place, the subject of which were the planned legal regulations concerning the Road Package. Representatives of CORTE submitted their remarks on the document published on 31 May this year. Proposals of the changes are the result of the work by experts under the Calculation Rules Working Group.

“The October meeting of CORTE summarized the Calculation Rules Working Group activities. The team has been working on a detailed Road Package analysis since June. This work allowed us to prepare more than 20 proposals for changes that could have a real impact on the final shape of the EU document and, as a result, support Polish and international transport companies. We look forward to the positive reception of our comments by representatives of the Member States,” says Małgorzata Stocerz, INELO expert and the CORTE Management Board member.

The most important issue that has become the focus of CORTE’s remarks is primarily taking the weekly rest periods. The planned changes include a mandatory minimum two regular and two reduced weekly rest periods during four weeks.  CORTE members, however, have noted that such regulations may be not clear when verifying driver’s working time. Another issue that can cause major problems in practice is the lack of clarity in reporting border crossing:

“Currently, all enforcement authorities during roadside checks may verify data from the last 28 days of driver’s work. As a result, within the framework of the Calculation Rules Working Group, we have come to the conclusion that the introduction of EC proposals concerning weekly rest periods within four rather than two weeks may result in not verifying them at all during the roadside checks. Another important challenge of the Road Package is the lack of clarity of regulations concerning border crossing reporting. The fact that such data must be entered manually may cause difficulties in maintaining the traffic flow. For this reason, changes have been proposed to facilitate the driver’s work and to speed up the country registration process. Attention has also been paid to the limited capacity of the driver card and the need to inform the driver when crossing the border is not registered automatically. A number of suggestions submitted indicates the need for more precise and clear wording of the regulations, since practice shows that whenever there is a problem of clarity (both for entrepreneurs themselves and for enforcement authorities), the interpretations may not be good for transport companies and may result in fines,” Małgorzata Stocerz summarizes.

All the remarks formulated during the meeting will be communicated to the European Commission without delay. Negotiations on the final wording of the Road Package are planned to be completed by June 2018.