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Mobility and Transport

Safe and secure truck parking

Secure parking places for trucks and commercial vehicles has been listed as a top priority in the ITS Action Plan and the ITS Directive 2010/40/EU. European truck drivers need to have appropriate information on safe and secure parking places.

Truck drivers in Europe are often confronted with insufficient number of parking facilities and therefore often park in non-secured zones or unsafe locations like hard shoulders, exposing themselves and other road users to potential thefts and high risk of accidents. The Commission is therefore active to improve the situation:

Overall capacity of truck parking areas needs to be improved: The revised 2013 TEN-T guidelines foresee for road transport infrastructure of the core network the development of rest areas on motorways approximately every 100 km to provide appropriate parking space for commercial road users with an appropriate level of safety and security.

Existing capacity needs to be optimised by digital information on for instance the location, equipment and facilities of existing parking areas: Specifications have been adopted by the Commission (delegated Regulation (EU) N°. 885/2013) on 15 May 2013 to facilitate the exchange of data and to ensure EU-wide accessible information providing an up-to-date inventory of safe and secure parking spaces for trucks along the main European transport corridors to enable the provision of services. More information on the ITS Directive and delegated Regulation 885/2013 (including links to the actual legal documents).

The Connected Europe Facility (CEF) is providing funding opportunities to address the above mentioned policy objectives.

European Access Point for Truck Parking Data

In accordance with Article 5 of Commission delegated Regulation (EU) No 885/2013 in the framework of the ITS Directive 2010/40/EU public or private parking operators and service providers shall share and exchange data related to safe and secure parking areas through a national or international access point. The Commission is managing a European Access Point for Truck Parking Data to enable continuity of services throughout the EU.

The European Access Point for Truck Parking aims to provide access to safe & secure truck parking data in DATEX II format. At this moment the Access Point only supports static data. The sole responsibility for data quality and the necessary updating/maintenance obligations remain with the Member States that are submitting the data to the Access Point.

All datasets are published by the European Commission on the European Union Open Data Portal: https://data.europa.eu/euodp/data/dataset/etpa

The TENTec Portal of the European Commission is providing a visual overview of available data.

How to submit data to the European Access Point for Truck Parking Data

The European Commission has produced a number of guidance documents for Member States how to gain access and to use the European Access Point:

General Guidance document: This document describes the overall functionalities of the European Access Point for Truck Parking data and gives additional guidance on the data elements of Article 4 of the delegated regulation. Further the European Commission has defined the minimum content of DATEX II profiles for the exchange of static safe and secure truck parking related data in accordance to delegated regulation 885/2013. All relevant information regarding this minimum DATEX II Profile can be found in the separate Annex I of the Guidance Document.

European Access Point User Manuals:

These documents describe how Member States can gain access to the different European Access Point tools as well as guidance how the different functionalities work.

The first manual focuses on the web based tools that are provided to users that have been authorised by the Member States. Here the focus lies on explaining how to gain access and how to enter, edit and maintain data making use of the provided web based online tools.

The second manual describes how to make use of a SOAP web service to directly push DATEX II to the European Access Point for truck parking. The purpose of this document is to provide the information needed for integrating this web service in the responsible authorities' local systems.

Links

Available DATEX II Truck Parking Data on the European Open Data Portal

TenTec Portal

More information on truck parking areas

ITS Studies