The Implementation Plan for the Three-year Action for Addressing the Root Cause of Road Transport Accidents and Ensuring Safety Production was issued to accelerate the transformation of safety production supervision towards proactive prevention

Recently, the general offices of the Ministry of Transport, the Ministry of Public Security, and the Ministry of Emergency Management jointly issued the Implementation Plan for the Three-year Action for Addressing the Root Cause of Road Transport Accidents and Ensuring Safety Production (hereinafter referred to as the Implementation Plan). It calls for continuous improvement in the safety awareness of traffic participants, effectively enhancing the intrinsic safety level of operating vehicles, ensuring enterprises to shoulder due responsibilities for workplace safety, optimizing the road transport safety production environment, and improving the long-term mechanisms for road transport safety supervision. The goal is to fundamentally eliminate major accident hazards and accelerate the transformation of road transport safety production supervision towards proactive prevention.

The Implementation Plan clarifies that the management of motor vehicle driver training and testing should be strictly enforced and the establishment of a comprehensive quality evaluation system for training and testing centered on drivers’ safe driving skills should be accelerated. Targeted safety education and training for operating drivers should be strengthened to improve their emergency driving skills. The relevant technical standards should be revised to improve the safety performance of newly manufactured passenger and cargo vehicles. The vehicle model management system for road transport vehicles should be strictly implemented to ensure that only compliant vehicles are allowed to enter the transport market. The illegal modification of vehicles, the use of heavy trucks with a total weight exceeding 100 tons, and the “large tank, small label” violations involving pressure vessels for hazardous liquid cargo should be severely cracked down upon. The phased withdrawal of buses with more than 57 seats and sleeper buses from the transport market should be carried out in an orderly manner to effectively control major safety risks.

According to the Implementation Plan, the safety assessments for the persons in charge and safety production managers of road transport and urban passenger transport enterprises will be strictly implemented to intensify efforts to supervise and urge the implementation of their safety responsibilities. Standards will be set for workplace safety in enterprises to promptly correct and avoid habitual violations of regulations. The dynamic investigation and management of major hazards will be strengthened and the mechanism for self-inspection, self-correction, and rectification of major accident hazards within enterprises will be improved. The closed-loop management of major accident hazard investigation and rectification will be strengthened. Enterprises with significant accident hazards will be placed under particular supervision and corrective actions will be urged to be completed within a specified timeframe.

The Implementation Plan clarifies the need to accelerate the revision of the Road Traffic Safety Law and the Road Transport Regulations to improve the legal environment for road transport safety. It also emphasizes advancing the refinement of highway safety facilities and traffic order management to optimize the road traffic environment. In addition, it outlines the improvement of mechanisms for investigating and handling road transport safety accidents, establishing and perfecting a system where “due diligence is exempt from liability, and neglect is held accountable,” and actively fostering a collaborative and participatory societal environment.

The Implementation Plan requires to establish and improve an information-sharing and utilization mechanism that covers road transport enterprises, operating vehicles, drivers, and vehicle operation trajectories, fully leverage the role of local anti-overloading leadership teams to improve the comprehensive governance mechanism for truck overloading, enhance the collaborative governance mechanism for fatigue driving of truck drivers with a strong crackdown on severe fatigue driving behaviors, and develop a credit-based classification and grading management mechanism to continuously improve the effectiveness of safety supervision.