Road safety directly affects all of the territory of the European Union and all its inhabitants: in the 15 member European Union, 375 million road users, 200 million of them driving licence holders, use 200 million vehicles on four million km of roads. Ever greater mobility comes at a high price: 1 300 000 accidents a year cause 40 000 deaths and 1 700 000 injuries on the roads.The direct and indirect cost of this carnage has been estimated at EUR 160 billion, i.e. 2 % of EU GNP. Although there has been a slow but regular improvement in safety overall (during the last 30 years, the overall volume of road traffic in the countries which today make up the EU has tripled, while the number of road deaths has fallen by half ), the situation is still socially unacceptable and difficult to justify to the citizen. In its White Paper on European transport policy1, the Commission has therefore proposed that the European Union should set itself the target of halving the number of road deaths by 2010. Although the Community has contributed to road safety over very many years, in particular through more than 50 technical standardisation directives, and despite the fact that the Maastricht Treaty clarified the legal means available to the Community to establish a framework and to act2, the Member States have been highly reluctant to take action at Community level, witness the harmonisation of blood alcohol limits which has been under discussion for 12 years. The Commission will propose standardising the rules on checks concerning the road traffic offences which cause the most deaths and concerning compliance with social regulations. In the context of a proposal on road infrastructure, the Commission proposes action to deal with particularly hazardous places. Another proposal will concern the recasting of the directive on driving licences.