On Monday, a large group of suburban municipalities agreed to ban all diesel-fueled cars built before 2000 inside the A86 Beltway, starting in July. In 2025, this will be upgraded to a ban on all diesel vehicles from before 2010, plus a ban on more polluting gasoline-powered cars built before 2006.
What’s ground-breaking about the law is the vast area in which it would ban a set of cars. The A86 is a major highway that lies far outside the borders of the official City of Paris. The new ban would thus extend far into the suburbs (themselves far more populous than the official city), into a region that has battled Paris’s mayor over anti-pollution measures in the past.
The zone it covers is very large, covering 79 of the 131 communes in the Greater Paris area, and it’s expected to remove 118,000 vehicles from the road. For this step, the participating municipalities deserve great credit. Not only will the size of their diesel-free zone have a major impact, it will also be implemented in a relatively car-dependent area where the political stakes for such a decision are potentially high. [...]
Then again, there’s yet another key factor making it much easier to push through legislation. France (like Britain) has already agreed to ban gasoline-powered cars by 2040—a date that’s far enough away that it doesn’t force immediate action, but not so far off as to be meaningless. Paris is going further by promising a ban on gasoline cars as early as 2030—still five years after all of Norway introduces its own ban.
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