WE JOIN THE COMMUNICATION TO MAINTAIN LOW EMISSIONS AREAS IN BARCELONA
A court ruling cannot stop the political and social consensus to improve air quality
A court ruling cannot stop the political and social consensus to improve air quality
The social entities ask that the ZBE Barcelona be maintained and rapidly evolve towards an urban toll together with forceful actions of modal change.
The Platform for Air Quality, the Association for the Promotion of Public Transport, the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Barcelona, Ecologists in Action, Eixample Respira, the Bicycle Club of Catalonia, Catalonia Anda and the Association for the Prevention of Traffic Accidents They claim that the debate opened by the TSJC ruling is not whether or not the ZBE is annulled, but what are the effective measures to guarantee the right to breathe clean air.
The entities regret the suspension by the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) of the ordinance of the Barcelona Low Emissions Zone (ZBE) to the area of Rondas de Barcelona. They consider that the sentence makes political assessments with technically false arguments, which exceed the legal sphere itself, and they trust that the resources that the administrations will present until the final sentence arrives, will allow the suspension of the ordinance to be stopped.
It must be remembered that this is not the first nor the last time that anti-pollution measures have been attempted to be reversed through the courts. Examples are found in other cities where anti-pollution policies were made that also suffered veto attempts in this way, such as Madrid or Paris, so it is not an isolated event.
For the organizations, the annulment of the ZBE would be a step backwards in the fight against pollution and in the face of the climate and energy emergency. That is why they insist that what needs to be done is to go much further. They consider that the ZBE is an instrument that allows the application of effective measures to reduce vehicles. In the same way, they ask that the applied vehicle renewal scheme be overcome, which has not allowed achieving the air quality objectives required by European regulations and recommended by the WHO, and from which other socio-environmental and economic impacts are derived. The entities want to remember that right now we have a judicial process open to the Court of Justice of the European Union for this repeated breach of air quality regulations. In this same sense, they ask the Generalitat, Barcelona City Council and other municipalities to rectify the renewal schemes in the existing and future ZBEs, to apply more forceful measures to reduce vehicles.
The existence of the ZBE facilitates the implementation of an urban toll together with forceful plans for modal change, such as those that entities have been requesting for years, with the reduction of private vehicles and the promotion of pedestrians, public and collective transport, the bicycle and the VMP. Effective measures of rapid execution to dissuade the habitual and individual use of the private vehicle, as evidenced by the 19 cities of 8 European countries where it has been applied.
