Exploring The Effect Of National Policies On The Safety Level Of Tunnels That Belong To The Trans-European Road Network: A Comparative Analysis

The trans-European road network (TERN) was defined to improve EUs road network guarantee users a high and uniform level of safety. TERNs tunnels must be designed to serve these purposes. To this respect, the EU introduced the Directive 2004/54/EC. The Directive imposed minimum infrastructure and equipment requirements for all TERNs tunnels attributing high importance to risk assessment method. This paper illustrates that the variety of the methods adopted by each member state do not guarantee the same level of safety for all TERNs tunnels. Presenting the general principles of EU methods, two methods, which share a high degree of similarity, are used to study the same fire accident at the same tunnel. The differences occurred in the estimated level of safety raises skepticism, as the tunnel has different safety level depending on the method and national policies used. The outcome illustrates the need to improve policy formulation on this matter.