Paris moves to ban older, polluting cars from its streets

To reduce pollution in Paris, the city recently introduced new regulations that ban cars built before 1997 from the city center during workdays. The move is expected to reduce emissions of particulate matter and nitrous oxide, a major public health issue in the city.

The city's car ban, which began on July 1, extends to everything from motorcycles to heavy goods vehicles and is in effect Monday through Friday, from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. The goal is to remove all older, polluting vehicles used for commuting. People can still drive older cars during the weekend.

For a brief moment several years ago, Paris had the worst air quality of any city on the planet. According to Hervé Levifve, a transportation expert in the deputy mayor’s office, half of the city's population is exposed to bad quality air every day, and air pollution in the city is estimated to kill 2,000 people a year.

“It's the largest cause of death in Paris, just after alcohol and tobacco,” Levifve says. “We are not in compliance with European standards and limits.”

Levifve says the ban will reduce emissions of nitrous oxide and particulate matters by about 5 percent, but this is just a first step. A plan is in the works to ban diesel vehicles from Paris by 2020. Even so, Levifve says, Paris still lags behind other European cities in the effort to reduce air pollution.

“We are quite late in Paris,” he says. "Over the last 20 years, about 200 low-emission zones [have been created] in different cities in Europe. Sometimes they are very big low-emission zones, like in London, where it is 1,700 square kilometers. Sometimes it’s very tiny, like in some cities in Italy.”

Parisians are not actually as highly motorized as people in other cities, Levifve notes. Only 40 percent of households in Paris own a car. So, a majority of the city’s population is breathing bad air caused by a minority of its citizens. “Even if some people are quite upset because they will not be able to use their car anymore, the majority of people are very happy that we are doing something against pollution,” he says.

The city is offering people a couple of incentives to follow the ban, as well. First, if you get rid of your old car, the city will provide some funding to use public transportation or for buying a bicycle or an electric bicycle. And, professionals whose jobs require a vehicle, like plumbers or delivery workers, can get help buying more efficient vehicles.

Beyond this, the city will spend 150 million euros by 2020 to create bicycle lanes and bicycle parking. “Today, 5 percent of people use bicycles. Our goal is to have 15 percent of people using bicycles,” Levifve says. “Our plan is to remove some lanes for cars and replace them with lanes for bicycles in order to make it safer and faster.”

In addition, the Paris City Council recently approved a plan to transform a stretch of highway along the Seine River in central Paris into a pedestrian-only zone.

“This motorway will be closed for cars beginning next October,” Levifve explains. “It will be replaced by pedestrian and cycle paths. We also have other projects around public transport, with a new cable car, new hybrid transit inside Paris and a lot of little things like that.”

This article is based on an interview that aired on PRI’s Living on Earth with Steve Curwood.