Transporte Profesional - 409 Abril 2020

48 Transporte Profesional / Abril 2020 ENTREVISTA Raluca Marian is the General Delegate of IRU’s Permanent Delegation to the European Union where she leads the lRU Brussels based team in charge of advocacy for the entire commercial transport by road, including mobility of people and goods. Texto: José Antonio Ruiz Vizcaíno Interview with Raluca Marian, General Delegate of IRU’s mission to the EU in Brussels After more than two years of ar- duous negotiations, during the last month of December the Council and the Parliament, finally reached an agreement on the First Mobility Package (MP). What can you tell us about it? The Mobility Package 1 proposals will potentially be finally approved and pu- blished in the early summer of 2020, if the European Parliament does not mo- dify the compromises. In any case the- re is still something critical about the first MP that is enforcement. Rules are only effective to the extent they can be enforced. You may already know, but after the 2008 crisis, enforcement bo- dies in some Member States were seve- rely hit, and some of them lost almost 80% of their personnel. So, there are complex rules and limited enforcement personnel. So, how can Member Sta- tes cope with it? Part of the answer is digitalization. Digitalization is the key. Rules can be more efficiently enforced if we go more digital. Digital enforce- ment opens the door to intelligence-led enforcement. The challenge with going digital is that now there is no compre- hensive strategy on law enforcement at EU level, including on digital. At a re- cent event at the European Parliament, we celebrated the 20th anniversary of the Social Dialogue with our partners at EU level, the European Transport workers’ Federation. We asked the EC (European Commission) to come up by the end of this year with a comprehen- sive strategy on digital enforcement. Can you comment anything on the return of the vehicle? Regarding the issue of the return of the vehicle, the EC has commissioned a study on the possible environmental impact of this specific measure, as it set out in the current trilogies’ agreement. Based on the results of the study, we will see to what extent this may affect this provision of the first PM. To say anything else about this topic would only be speculation from my side, so we will have to wait for the results of the EC’s study. The European Green Deal(EGD) is one of the most ambitious projects of the new Commissions. What can you tell us about it? Indeed, the EGD is the flagship project of the Von der Leyen’s Commission, and the new EC has already delivered some clear mes- sages about it. First, decarbonisation is the strongest message that the EC is sending to us through the EGD, and we as industry are committed to de- carbonisation. Part of that message is forced modal shift. From the industry perspective we would like to say, that road transport, and that is a fact, will remain the dominant way of transport of goods in the EU and its demand will continue to grow. This means that the shift to other modes is not the solution as such and should not be forced; it should be voluntary. And one should not forget to green also the road trans- port, because as I said road transport will remain the most important freight transport mode. The politicians should not forget that we also need support in greening the road transport sector. “The demand of road transport will increase in the future”