On July 2, 2018, EWMI ACCESS and its grantee the Georgian Alliance for Safe Roads (GASR) organized a Policy Forum to assess the first six months of reintroducing the Periodic Technical Inspection of Vehicles (PTI) in Georgia in January 2018. Between the abolishment of the PTI in 2004 and its recent reintroduction, Georgia was one of the few countries in Europe, where vehicles were not required to undergo a road worthiness testing of any kind. Currently, over 90% of Georgia’s obsolete car fleet is between 10-20 years old and it is the main contributor to the alarming levels of air pollution across the country.
The Forum brought together the Tbilisi Mayor, Minister of Economy and Sustainable Development, Deputy Interior Minister, Chairman of the Parliamentary Committee on Environmental Protection and other policy-makers, as well as non-governmental stakeholders to discuss the progress to date and the main challenges in the PTI reform process.
Representatives of the national and local government welcomed the dialogue with GASR and other Georgian Civil Society Organizations (CSOs) in raising citizen awareness about the importance of the PTI and other reforms aimed at improving the air quality and road safety in Georgia.
GASR used the Forum to flag lax enforcement, emissions by public transport and other issues jeopardizing one of the most important national reforms targeting 1.2 million vehicles nationwide. Policy-makers promised to take further steps to raise the quality of fuel, use smart cameras to enforce PTI, replace outdated public transport and limit the import of old cars.
In autumn 2018 and spring 2019, with EWMI ACCESS support, GASR will analyze the PTI data and monitor the vehicle testing process in Tbilisi and the regions of Georgia. Through this monitoring, GASR will identify the main challenges in the PTI implementation and enforcement process and present respective recommendations to policy-makers.
