In Spain, barely one-fifth of the country’s cities have complied with national Low Emission Zone (LEZ) laws, El Debate reports. At the same time, the Catalonia region has now gone far beyond the national legislation, passing a law that will ultimately only allow cars with the highest environmental rating to circulate in cities.
Non-compliance indicates that, at the very least, municipalities are being forced to confront the drastic consequences of environmentalist anti-car ideology.
Since 2021, Spanish national legislation has required that all cities with more than 50,000 residents establish low emission zones. In such zones, where car access and circulation is restricted, only cars with a top environmental rating of A are allowed to circulate and park easily. This law now affects 150 cities in Spain, according to El Debate. The news site also reports that only 20% of cities have even applied the law and put LEZ in place.
Additionally, many cities that have implemented the law have used such tricks as putting the LEZ in areas that were already dedicated to pedestrian traffic only, or in parks, to evade restricting car use. Only the cities of Madrid and Barcelona, the two largest sites in the country, have followed the letter of the law regarding low emission zones, according to El Debate. The LEZ laws affect some 26 million cars in Spain.
The region of Catalonia, however, went further than national legislation, by passing a law that requires low emission zones in cities of more than 20,000 inhabitants. It also banned the circulation of cars without an environmental label and will forbid cars with a B level environmental rating from circulating at all in municipalities as of 2028.
But one mayor has promised to fight the law. Xavier García Albiol, from the center-right Partido Popular, is the mayor of Badalona, a city of some 200,000 people just east of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast. He called the new law a “barbarity and nonsense” in a post on X and promised to fight it in the courts. According to the mayor, the law would affect half the cars in the city. He said he stood against the law on the grounds that it will force half the residents to either replace their current cars or forgo driving within a very short period of time, a situation that many will not be able to afford.
El Debate also points out that there are no real direct consequences for cities that fail to comply with LEZ laws and that creating them lies entirely in the hands of municipal governments. The only consequence is that if, in 2027, these cities have not met certain air quality standards they can lose access to the European Union’s Next Generation Funds.
