Stricter legislation, yes, but not immediately. This Thursday, the council of the Métropole du Grand Paris voted to postpone until January 1, 2025 the next great wave of vehicle bans within its Low Emission Zone (ZFE), the largest in France with 7.2 million inhabitants.
From the beginning of 2025, cars with the Crit’Air 3 sticker (diesel registered between 2006 and 2010 and gasoline registered between 1997 and 2005) will no longer be able to access the 77 municipalities of the metropolis within the A86. This ban affects 380,000 vehicles according to AFP.
Multiple deferrals
This new ban is part of a progressive exclusion of older vehicles, considered the most polluting. Therefore, ZFE had already introduced a ban on the movement of unclassified vehicles and Crit’air 5 in July 2019, then Crit’air 4 in June 2021.
The ban on Crit’Air 3 vehicles should have occurred earlier, according to the preset schedule. Initially announced for July 2022, then postponed to July 2023, then postponed to 2024. It will finally take place after the Olympics, in early 2025.
A piece of news that follows the government announcements earlier in the week. The system has been relaxed in many cities and only five metropolises retain a “binding ZFE” (Paris, Lyon, Aix-Marseille, Rouen and Strasbourg) where regulatory air quality thresholds are regularly exceeded.
Sanctions, aid to motorists
To justify this decision, the representatives of the Metropolis invoke technical incapacities to sanction offenders, de facto KOing any early ban, as well as the lack of support for aid to motorists.
It is “materially impossible” to introduce it this summer, in the “absence of tangible responses from the State” on the guarantee of the zero-rate loan and the automated control of sanctions, representatives inform AFP. “As long as the government doesn’t move forward, we won’t be able to establish our EPZ,” President LR Patrick Ollier insisted during the metropolitan council on Thursday.
Source: BFM TV
