Dangerous goods trucks checked against a new list of 50 infringements from 17 September

From 17 September, a check on a tanker carrying diesel or on a truck carrying gas cylinders is made against a new list of infringements, with 50 entries. Through Decision no. 614/2026, the Government has amended the Rules on carrying out the road transport of dangerous goods in Romania, approved in 2007. The decision transposes a delegated directive of the European Commission of June 2025, which changed the annexes to the European directive on uniform procedures for checks in this field. It is the second intervention of the year on the rules for the transport of dangerous goods, after the replacement of the rules for air transport.

Dangerous goods are not an exotic category. They include the fuels that reach petrol stations, gas cylinders, the chlorine used by water treatment plants, fertilisers, industrial paints, the acids used in factories and chemical waste. The rules come from A.D.R., the European agreement that lays down how these goods are packaged, labelled and transported, while the Romanian rules say who carries out the checks and what happens when something is not in order.

The amendment does not change the European agreement, but the Romanian part of it: who grants authorisations, how infringements are classified, what is reported and which form is used for roadside checks.

Also for road freight transport, the State has published the funding guide for zero-emission lorries, the 299 million euro scheme from the Modernisation Fund.

What it changes in practice

The most visible effect is the list of offences, rewritten in full across three articles. Risk category I, which covers acts carrying a high risk of death, of serious personal injury or of significant damage to the environment, contains 26 offences. Among them: the carriage of goods whose transport is prohibited, the leakage of dangerous substances, transport with a vehicle that has no vehicle approval certificate, the absence of the driver’s A.D.R. training certificate, the use of unprotected fire, failure to observe the smoking ban and refusal to allow the check. The decision states that, where they are found during a roadside check, the usual measure is immobilisation of the vehicle.

Risk category II, with 18 offences, covers infringements that present a risk of personal injury or of damage to the environment, without there being an immediate danger: missing or non-compliant fire extinguishers, expired test deadlines for packagings and tanks, improper closure of receptacles, non-compliant labels and markings. Here the typical measure is not immobilisation, but bringing the vehicle into conformity at the place of the check or, where that is not possible, by the end of the journey.

Risk category III has only 6 offences, of low risk, and the decision says that no corrective measure is needed on the spot for them, the remedy being one the undertaking can carry out later: wrong dimensions of the orange-coloured plates or of the labels, information missing from the transport documents other than the serious cases, the absence on board of the driver’s A.D.R. training certificate where there is evidence that he holds one, the absence on board of a photographic means of identification for each member of the crew.

The second effect is the margin of appreciation left to the officer carrying out the check. The text says that an offence is placed in a risk category by the staff with control duties, depending on the specific circumstances of each offence and on the basis of their own assessment, and that the category may be raised or lowered, in compliance with the criteria laid down in the rules. Offences that do not appear in the three lists are classified by comparison with the description of the categories.

The third effect concerns hauliers with several problems at the same check. If the check report records several offences for the same transport unit, that unit is classified only once, under the most serious risk category among those found. This is a reporting rule, not a penalty rule: it does not mean that a single fine is issued, only that the vehicle enters the statistics once.

The fourth effect is a new authorisation. In the list of duties in Article 15, the authorisation of the road transport of radioactive materials is introduced as a separate entry. A new paragraph is added there as well, under which the technical rules for some of these duties are to be approved by a joint order of the minister of internal affairs and the minister of transport and infrastructure, an order that has to be issued within 180 days of the entry into force of the decision, that is by 16 March 2027.

The fifth effect has to do with reporting. The institutions with control duties send the Road Transport Directorate of the ministry, by 31 May each year, a report with the number of checks carried out, the number of vehicles checked by country of registration, the number and types of offences, and the type and number of penalties. The body that issues safety adviser certificates sends, by the same date, the total volume of dangerous goods carried by road, in tonnes and in tonne-kilometres. The ministry sends the European Commission the reports covering two years, by 31 December of each even year.

Finally, the check report itself changes. Annex no. 1 to the rules is replaced by the form in the annex to the decision, set out in two columns, in Romanian and in English, with 31 entries running from the place, the date and the time of the check, the registration number and the undertaking carrying out the transport, through to the corrective measures, the seal applied or broken and the institution that carried out the check.

What has changed compared with the previous situation

The rules now amended were approved by Government Decision no. 1.175/2007, published in Official Gazette of Romania no. 696 of 15 October 2007, and have been amended several times since. Decision no. 614/2026 intervenes on fourteen points of them.

Three of the interventions are structural. Article 12 paragraph (3) is repealed. Article 13 paragraph (1) is rewritten so that vehicles registered or put into circulation in Member States of the European Union are authorised to carry out international transport of dangerous goods in Romania if they comply with the European directive on the inland transport of dangerous goods. Article 14 now refers, for derogations, to section 1.1.3 and to chapters 1.6 and 1.7 of Annex A to A.D.R.

A fourth intervention concerns undertakings that handle high consequence dangerous goods: Article 20 refers them to the tables in paragraphs 1.10.3.1.2 and 1.10.3.1.3 and requires them to comply with chapter 1.10 of Annex A to A.D.R., that is with the security rules, including the security plan. Failure to comply with that chapter appears, in the new list, under risk category I, and the text specifies that this also covers failure to draw up or to implement the security plan.

The annual reporting done by undertakings now follows the model in Annex no. 3d) to the rules on the training and professional certification of safety advisers, approved by Order of the minister of transport no. 1.214/2015, so through a reference to an existing act instead of a description of its own.

The most important thing that has not changed is the A.D.R. agreement itself. The decision does not amend any technical rule on packaging, labelling or loading, only the way the Romanian state checks and reports on them. Anyone carrying dangerous goods has nothing to change about the goods, but does have to reread what happens at a check.

The moment of application is also different from the usual one. Most Government decisions enter into force on publication. This one expressly provides for 30 days, so it applies from 17 September 2026, which leaves a month for training drivers and safety advisers.

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