On one hand, locals are preparing for the mid-January arrival of one of the strongest car-control measures yet: a weekday driving ban on cars built before 1997. On the other hand, the city’s Mayor Anne Hidalgo, known as a promoter of pro-green policies, is facing a fierce backlash against one of her key anti-pollution measures: banning all cars from a central section of the right bank of the Seine. On Wednesday morning, 168 mayors from the Greater Paris region condemned the move in an open letter to Le Figaro, demanding its repeal. So is Paris taking a step forward or a step back?
Both upcoming laws impose tighter control on cars than you’ll find in almost any other city. Paris’s new emissions control system will require all cars driving inside the Boulevard Périphérique beltway between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. to display one of five special badges detailing its age and the emissions category it falls into. One badge, for example, is for cars constructed after January 2011 that perform to the top two tiers of the European Emissions Standards. Large trucks in the same category, meanwhile, must conform to the top tier and have been constructed since January 2014. Older cars, trucks, and motorbikes constructed to lower emissions standards are grouped in subsequent categories, until they reach cars built before 1997 or motorbikes built before 2000, which aren’t eligible for a badge at all. Any vehicle caught driving in Paris during work hours without a badge faces a €68 ($72) fine, rising to €135 ($143) for trucks. [...]
It’s too early to see how much kickback there will be against that law, which was officially introduced in July with an agreement not to levy any fines until January 16, 2017. Paris City Hall insists that only 1 percent of drivers will be affected, suggesting that the law change is mainly about introducing the principle of the weekday driving ban, in order to tighten it further later with less resistance. If their estimates are correct, January 16 may end up passing fairly quietly. [...]
Dig a little deeper and you’ll see that part of the conflict comes partly from a lack of an overarching body covering all of Greater Paris. While some mayors of inner Paris boroughs signed the letter, the great majority of mayor signatories represent commuter towns. Their immediate concern is making their voters’ commutes a little easier, not improving the air quality in a district they don’t represent. For Hidalgo, the situation is the opposite. Angry commuters and their representatives can make her life difficult to an extent, but they aren’t the voters she has to answer to. This places inner and outer Paris in an inevitable stand-off, at least when it comes to roads.
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