<p>River floods pose a significant threat to road transport infrastructure in Europe. This study presents a high-resolution object-based continental-scale assessment of direct flood risk of the European road network for the present climate, using high-resolution exposure data from OpenStreetMap. A new set of road-specific damage functions is developed and validated for an observed flood event. We estimate the median annual expected direct damage from river floods to road infrastructure in Europe at 250 million euro per year. A comparison with grid-based approaches suggests that these methods likely overestimate direct flood damage to road infrastructure and might allocate infrastructural damage to the wrong land use classes. A first validation shows that our object-based method computes realistic damage estimates, paving the way for targeted risk adaptation strategies.</p>