“We are working on it”. The well-worn phrase is repeated by the Catalan councils of more than 50,000 inhabitants obliged to have a low-emissions zone (ZBE), in progress since this year. The restrictions on the most polluting vehicles already in force in Barcelona, ??L’Hospitalet or Sant Cugat are neither there nor expected in cities such as Tarragona, Granollers or Sant Boi, to mention three of the 23 cities that should have measures activated in hours now In fact, only five cities have the measures on paper and three apply them: Barcelona, ??l’Hospitalet and Sant Cugat.
The extensions that lead to compliance with the provisions of the climate change law approved in 2021 are also not accompanied by short-term calendars in most cases. The complexity of the technical work is the reason put forward by the councils consulted by La Vanguardia. The court ruling that overturned the ZBE of Barcelona put the rest on guard and has entailed much more paperwork than they had planned at the beginning. The legal framework that supports the new low-emissions zones is now much more complex in order to avoid resources from those affected, such as what has forced the Catalan capital to draw up another ordinance.
The councils have at their disposal a model legal text promoted by the Spanish Federation of Municipalities and Provinces (FEMP) and which serves as a theoretical and legal framework to put it into action. At first, the document was drawn up by the City Council and the Metropolitan Area of ??Barcelona (AMB), but when the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) overturned the ordinance, they chose to commission a other to independent professionals. The new wording conforms to what is set out in the royal decree published by the Government on December 27, 2022, four days before the deadline in which the councils theoretically had to activate the low-emission zones of which they did not know the fine print. In practice, what was supposed to take place “before 2023” for the ministry, aware that it had not done its homework on time, was extended the whole year. The extension has not been of much use, two months before it ends, most municipalities have not fulfilled their part.
The problem, according to municipal technicians, is that there is a lot of work beyond the ordinance, which is the document that has always grabbed attention. “What is really important is the technical report that is included in the annex”, emphasizes Alfons Perona, lawyer and consultant specialized in mobility and road safety. This document is what causes real headaches for the officials who are tasked with drafting the necessary documentation to make the ZBE possible. Most councils commission the report from consultants, in which the perimeter, the affected vehicles must be delimited and indicate how the restrictions will be controlled. “But the documentation they have to prepare goes much further, it is necessary to justify why a specific area is chosen and not another, the social measures for vulnerable groups that cannot enter, the moratoriums…”, Carles enumerates Labraña, project manager of the Association of Municipalities for Mobility and Urban Transport (AMTU), representative of the majority of councils that are involved in this process.
All the measures that are taken must also be accompanied by a legal analysis that gives them legal validity. For Perona, who has advised several councils in other parts of Spain, “drafting the report that goes as an annex to the ordinance requires between three and six months of work at least”. The AMTU has activated the purchasing center for the subsequent step, the acquisition of the cameras and the associated technology, to try to shorten deadlines and apply a common system, one of the main concerns of the mayors of the metropolitan arc.
In addition to the technical difficulties, the paralysis associated with the municipal elections had a lot to do with it. Before May, no mayor wanted to tell residents that he would ban them from driving. After the summer is when things have been reactivated. In some cases, with modifications due to the change of mayor, as is the case of Badalona, ??one of the few cities that has had a phantom ZBE in effect since January 1, without street signs or surveillance cameras. The popular Xavier García Albiol is now willing to play with the margin given to him by the moratoriums to delay as much as he can the start of the fines, but without eliminating the ZBE because this would cause the loss of European funds, which must be executed before the end of next year, according to what has been agreed with Brussels. In the case of Badalona, ??it would be more than two million euros.
The Government has made it clear. The Minister of Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, warned that she would take municipalities that do not activate low-emissions zones to court. A few days later, the Ministry of Transport sent a letter to all the municipalities that have received aid in which they warned that they risk having to return the funds received if they do not comply.
Of the 23 cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants in Catalonia, five already have them on paper, although there are actually three: Barcelona, ??l’Hospitalet and Sant Cugat. The first and largest is the one delimited by the rounds, which includes practically all of the municipal terms of Barcelona and l’Hospitalet. Cornellà, on the other hand, barely has four streets within the ZBE and has yet to develop one for the rest of the city. If that of the Catalan capital and the second largest city in Catalonia were the ones that paved the way, Sant Cugat has become the benchmark for a medium-sized city council that has done its homework. For its part, Badalona is an example of how, according to Europe, you can have an operational low-emissions zone (and it is so, valid from January 1, 2023), despite the fact that in practice it has a moratorium that keeps it deactivated for now.
The rest of the municipalities with more than 50,000 inhabitants are recorded in the ministry as “in process”, although this fork is very wide. Reus and Terrassa, if we mention two specific examples, are in a very advanced phase, almost ready to implement them in the streets, while others, such as Vilanova, have barely begun to outline what they want to do.
The only town obliged by law to have a ZBE and listed as “pending” is Cerdanyola del Vallès. There is the paradox that the new vice-president of Mobility of the Metropolitan Area of ??Barcelona (AMB), Carlos Cordón, is the mayor of this city and must be in charge in the political sphere of promoting and coordinating these policies in the Barcelona conurbation. Nothing to do with the predecessor, Antoni Poveda, who as mayor of Sant Joan Despí led by example and created a ZBE in his municipality despite not being obliged to because it was smaller. Sant Adrià de Besòs did something similar, and in this case took advantage of the creation of the area delimited by the rounds of Barcelona and expanded the radius to almost the entire population. On the other hand, Esplugues, on the other side of the rounds, was in the same situation and chose to limit the ZBE solely to the area that remains inside the ring of the rounds.
