Increasing traffic and decreasing resources demand sustainable management of road traffic infrastructure. To assure nationwide or even EU-wide uniform levels of certain road surface parameters, policies have been issued that set limits on the levels of these parameters: upper limits (in the case of noise) or lower limits (in the case of skid resistance). To achieve these levels, different strategies have been developed – and these strategies differ throughout Europe and can even vary within individual single countries.
The aim of this report is to give an overview of the current state of policies for skid resistance, rolling resistance and noise emissions in Europe. The extent of existing policies varies in many respects. For noise emissions, regulations have been issued both by the European bodies and individual member states. For skid resistance, the only policies that exist are national; most of them are listed in Annex II to this report. Rolling resistance is a mainly untouched field in terms of policies.
The main part of this report is the documentation of current practices at both EU and national levels. One purpose of this report was to attempt to identify the various policies and then to distinguish between the different approaches used and investigate the reasoning behind them. Therefore, for all three fields, questionnaires were designed and sent out to project partners and their contacts in their respective countries and those of other European partners. Literature surveys have been carried out to summarise the underlying standards
and foundations of the different policies. A workshop has been carried out to discuss the ideas of policies with a wider expert audience. The results of the workshop are incorporated in this report. |
