The TYROSAFE Project is a Coordination and Support Action (CSA) under the Seventh EU Framework Programme. The project is examining the possibilities for developing harmonised approaches in Europe to the optimisation and management of the key safety and environmental properties of road surfaces in their interaction with tyres. The assessment of these properties - skid resistance, rolling resistance and noise - are a different stages of development generally and there is widely varying awareness of the issues and practice across Europe. The three-year project began in July 2008 and is being carried out by a consortium comprising AIT from Austria (formerly known as arsenal research), BASt from Germany, LCPC from France, RWS from the Netherlands, TRL from the United Kingdom and ZAG from Slovenia and FEHRL, the Forum of European Highway Research Laboratories based in Belgium. There are four technical Work Packages (WP): o WP1 is assessing the current status of policies and approaches to management of the three key topics in the EC. o WP2 is reviewing the technical issues and proposing strategies for the harmonisation of skid resistance test methods across Europe. o WP3 is looking in some detail at the road surface properties that influence the three properties and their interdependencies o WP4 will review the environmental effects of optimising the properties of surfaces and the potential impact of climatic change on a harmonised approach The measurement and provision of skid resistance has been the subject of research for over 75 years and some individual countries now set standards for skid resistance on their road networks (or parts of them). These are typically based on measurements with specialised devices that may be local (and often unique) to these countries. However, the absence of an accepted common scale for characterizing road surfaces with respect to skid resistance properties is a serious hindrance for developing consistent policies for the provision of adequate skid resistance across Europe that would make the European road network safer. Greater awareness of environmental aspects of roads and traffic has meant that the noise generation properties of tyres and road surfaces have become a greater focus for research in recent decades. Interest in reducing fuel consumption and vehicle emissions, especially CO2, has led to greater attention being paid to the topic of rolling resistance, particularly by the tyre industry but, from the point of setting standards for road surfaces, work on this subject is still in its infancy. Traffic noise is a major concern within the EC but methods for assessing the noise performance pavements explicitly are not fully established. This report is concerned primarily with WP1, which provides important background information for the other technical work packages but also gives an opportunity to make recommendations for the development of harmonised policies at a European level.