City bans are spreading in Europe

Secondly, the results of the survey show that consumers are turning away from diesel, with 69% saying that it is “not too likely” or “not at all likely” that their next car will be a diesel. Air quality concerns and the effect of city bans are cited as main reasons for these choices. Thirdly, the survey shows that low-emission zones are not unpopular at all. In fact, more than two thirds of consumers support city bans. These messages are encouraging for cities taking action for clean air: Their efforts are paying off and there is broad public support for effective measures.

In order to make these local measures effective, specific recommendations are given at the end of the briefing: Cities should be free to design their urban vehicle access restriction policies as they see fit the local circumstances, public health and environment, but should make use of remote sensing data rather than arbitrarily banning specific euro-classes. A comprehensive EU-wide programme is needed to clean up the 43 million of dirty diesel cars and vans on the road today, combining software and hardware fixes. The effectiveness of these fixes must be independently certified to ensure significant emission reductions are achieved in the real-world. In addition to coordinating measures at EU level, governments should take action to restrict the influx of dirty diesels. This is legally possible as a recent legal analysis commissioned by T&E found.