ZFI everywhere, it’s over. This Monday, the government unveiled the new version of the Low Emission Zones that seeks to respond to the growing discontent of motorists but also of certain elected officials.
Schematically, while by 2025 42 cities with more than 150,000 inhabitants were going to initially establish ZFIs (11 have already established them), the government now establishes the distinction between “two types of territories”, depending on whether or not they respect the regulation Thresholds of quality of the air: cities “in surveillance zone” and “ZFE territories”.
The former, when the air quality has improved, may decide to suspend the following stages of the restriction schedule provided by law. Only five metropolises (ZFE territories) will have to continue gradually applying the restrictions by 2025 as the air quality has deteriorated.
“A Semantic Advertisement”
What in the best of cases is considered a relaxation, in the worst a regression is welcomed by the associations of motorists, less by environmentalists. But for some elected officials, it was necessary to go even further.
On BFMTV, Philippe Tabarot, Senator LR of the Alpes-Maritimes, author of a report on ZFEs, believes that these announcements “have been overinterpreted. Nothing was decided yesterday, the minister (Christophe Béchu, editor’s note) simply made a semantic announcement , recalled the current law (…) We have renamed certain ZFEs because the acronym is pejorative”.
“The Government believes that it can get out of there by changing the name of the ZFE, it is most likely that it will have to go to the bottom, provide additional resources, help the most modest households and above all explain things well and give time,” he insists. . Felipe Tabarot.
The elected official has thus presented a bill that “does not intend to abolish these ZFE but simply to take time to better synchronize things and help the French who have obvious difficulties in finding less polluting vehicles and being able to allow them to be financed.”
postpone the deadline
Philippe Tabarot also calls for “a deadline of 2030” instead of 2025 “because I do not see how we could deprive more than ten million vehicles of circulation and completely prohibit the circulation of 3 million vehicles in the five affected sectors, including 1.5 million in the Paris region.
And highlight the panic of the logistics actors in particular Rungis “to learn that 30% of the trucks, the delivery people will not be able to return to Paris in a year and a half if the law does not change.”
At the same time, the senator offers a zero-rate loan for the purchase of clean urban cars or Critair 1 “because the second-hand electricity market is insufficient.”
Source: BFM TV
