The Greater Paris metropolitan authority has approved the creation of a low-emission zone, with the aim of banning all petrol and diesel cars from access by 2030.
It will not be the city of Paris alone that bans the cars most responsible for local air pollution. On 12 November, the council of the Greater Paris metropolitan authority – the body that also encompasses all the municipalities surrounding the capital – approved the introduction of a "low-emission zone" ("zone à faibles émissions"). This is an area bounded by the A86 ring road, within which 79 municipalities are located.
It will come into force from July 2019 and will apply to all vehicles classified at level 5 on the Crit'Air scale https://www.lifegate.it/persone/stile-di-vita/parigi-vignette-diesel. That is, all diesel vehicles registered before 2001, which – following the model already in place in Paris – will not be permitted to circulate on working days between 8am and 8pm. Then, from 2021, the restrictions will extend to Crit'Air 4 vehicles. And so on until 2024, when access will be banned for all diesel cars. The scheme will then conclude in 2030, when the proposal is to ban all petrol cars as well.
"This is a historic measure," commented the president of the metropolitan authority, Patrick Ollier. "Air pollution causes between five thousand and six thousand deaths in the area every year." A decision that, moreover, while not achieving unanimous consensus, has also made inroads on the right: Ollier himself, for example, belongs to the conservative party Les Républicains. As do numerous mayors of the 79 municipalities involved.
There are those, however – such as the mayor of Asnières-sur-Seine – who have explained that "the risk is that some of us will be forced not to sign the resolutions, if the state and the region have not concretely helped the population to change their cars or to use alternative means of transport." On the other hand, from the environmentalists' perspective, the measures could actually be insufficient. Crit'Air 5 vehicles represent only a small share of the vehicles currently in circulation, and the hope had been that the measure could already be extended to Crit'Air 4 cars from July 2019.
According to data from the monitoring body Airparif, cited by the newspaper Le Monde, 1.3 million residents of the Île-de-France region are in fact exposed to levels of nitrogen dioxide that exceed the maximum limits set by the European Union.
It is partly for this reason that Paris's Socialist mayor, Anne Hidalgo, is considering an even more ambitious project. According to reports in the French press, should she be elected for a new term, the mayor intends to pedestrianise a vast area of the historic centre. All four of the first arrondissements – the districts that encompass the heart of the city and include tourist sites such as Notre Dame, the Pompidou Centre, the Île Saint-Louis, the Louvre, the Hôtel de Ville, and the Marais and Les Halles neighbourhoods. For a total surface area of over approximately 560 hectares. Almost as much as the entire Parco Nord in Milan.
