“Today, with the first fifteen territories mobilizing for the deployment of low-emission zones, we are launching a dynamic that we want to be irreversible at both national and local level. » On October 8, 2018, when she made this announcement, Elisabeth Borne was not yet Prime Minister in charge of ecological planning but Minister of Transport – the leading sector emitting greenhouse gases – within the Ministry of Ecological Transition. And the government is already under pressure.
In the summer of 2017, just after Emmanuel Macron’s election, the Council of State ordered him to take, “as soon as possible”, “all necessary measures” to put an end to the overruns of air pollution standards, responsible for more than 40,000 premature deaths per year, and which have caused France to be under the threat of a condemnation by the Court of Justice of the Union European.
To respond to this double injunction, the government is promoting low emission zones (ZFE). A pillar of its anti-pollution policy, they are supposed to gradually eradicate the oldest cars – and therefore the most emissive in gases harmful to health and the environment – from city centers on the basis of Crit’Air vignettes. This October 8, 2018, Elisabeth Borne sets a goal: these EPZs will have to be deployed or reinforced − Paris launched its own in 2015 − in the fifteen cities and metropolises most affected by pollution problems by the end of 2020. By the way , the government is transferring responsibility to local communities while promising them to “provide the means to implement them easily”.
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Five years later, the EPZs are treading water. In Lille as in Fort-de-France, although regularly affected by severe pollution peaks, they are still the subject of discussion. In Toulouse as in Nice, where it was implemented only this year, the ZFE only concerns heavy goods vehicles and the oldest vans, i.e. 1% of the car fleet. In Marseilles as in Lyon, two of the most polluted cities in France, it will apply to individuals from September but again only to diesel vehicles registered before 2000 (Crit’Air 5) and to gasoline in circulation for more than twenty -five years, or at most 2% of the car fleet.
In Grenoble, yet often cited as an example among the pioneering cities, individuals will not be called upon until 2023, well after heavy goods vehicles and commercial vehicles, the only ones concerned today. As for the metropolis of Strasbourg, which has also communicated a lot about the launch of its ZFE in 2022, it is for the time being “educational”, without risk of sanction for motorists, and the Alsatian Medef has just seized the administrative court for oppose the planned end, by 2028, of all diesel vehicles.
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