Safety outcomes of internationalization of domestic road haulage: a review of the literature

The European Union (EU) promotes gradual lifting of restrictions on foreign hauliers involved in domestic road transport of goods (cabotage), and a major deregulation was scheduled in 2014. Due to complaints from several member states facing competition from new EU-countries with lower labour costs, this process was postponed until 2015. An important aspect related to such a deregulatory reform includes potential consequences for transport safety and accident risk factors. The main aims of the current paper are therefore to examine the potential transport safety outcomes of increasing internationalization of domestic road haulage, and to examine potential accident risk factors of foreign hauliers. This is done by reviewing the research literature. This paper shows that the heavy goods vehicle (HGV) accident risk varies with a factor of up to 10 in European countries, and that the accident risk of foreign HGVs is approximately two times higher than that of domestic HGVs in the studied European countries. The paper points to several risk factors and concludes that better data on accident risk and risk factors must be gathered in order to enable European authorities to correctly analyse and respond to this important traffic safety challenge.