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At the April Plenary Session European Parliament adopted a resolution on the handling of heavy goods vehicles at border crossing points. MEPs point out that various factors including insufficient technical capacity, staff shortages, and time-consuming checks on freight, hundreds of goods vehicles are held up every day at the EU’s internal borders, including the borders between Schengen and non-Schengen EU Member States, where vehicles face extremely long wait times and delays.  MEPs note that lengthy queues of goods vehicles on the EU’s external borders with Western Balkans countries are particularly worrisome.

MEPs call for EU action to address the long waiting times for HGV at internal EU borders, and calls on the Council to quickly decide on the full Schengen membership of Romania and Bulgaria. To address the issues at borders, MEPs propose the following measures:

• Binding EU legislative measures for an EU-wide standard of one minute on average for handling heavy goods vehicles at intra-EU border crossing points;
• Legislation to allow truck drivers to use smaller border crossings when main arteries are closed for road maintenance, in order to avoid drivers depending on arbitrary actions by individual countries;
• Further efforts from EU countries to reinforce cross-border cooperation on combatting theft from goods vehicles.

The Parliament issued a press release on the resolution which is accessible via this link.