Barcelona’s low emission zone is still in force and offenders can be fined

The Fifth Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) has rejected the provisional execution of the sentence that annulled the municipal ordinance that regulates the low emissions zone (ZBE) of Barcelona, ​​understanding that there were missing reports that support some restrictions. The magistrates have denied, in this way, the request of one of the entities that filed the lawsuit against that regulation, specifically the Platform Association of People Affected by Circulatory Restrictions.

The resolution of the TSJC maintains that the request for the provisional execution of the sentence was requested when the term to appeal said sentence had not yet expired, nor had it been announced that it would be done. And it is only at that moment when such a measure can be requested. The judges recall that “other judgments have been issued in appeals with the same purpose” where it is agreed that the provisional execution can be requested “at the appropriate provisional moment”, for which reason the inadmissibility of the association’s request “is obligatory to guarantee the processing Simultaneous and equal to the requests that may be made, not being appropriate” to prioritize one of them presented in advance, highlights the Catalan high court.

inordinate restriction

The sentence handed down last March and that it will not be executed yet, includes, among other reasons, that the low emissions zone has an excessive geographical scope of implementation and an excessive restriction of the type of vehicles affected. The high court admitted that the European Union has denounced Barcelona’s air quality and does not question Barcelona City Council’s intervention, but rather that the proposed measures must be proportionate. For the judges, in the administrative file “there is not a sufficient analysis of the alternatives, nor of the economic, social and market and competition consequences produced by the measures, nor are the costs and benefits that the project implies sufficiently evaluated. disposal by their recipients, as well as administrative burdens”.

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The court ruling underlines that there are “substantial flaws in the preparation of the standard”, especially in regard to the memories and reports used, based on outdated data, which requires it to be annulled. An example, he emphasizes, is that “there is no data in the file that allows determining the number of affected vehicles in their different categories”, nor are “the recipients of a professional or economic activity quantified”. They also argue that the DGT’s environmental classification system is “rigid” and “does not offer any alternative solution” to homologate vehicles that do not have it. That is to say, in his understanding, “mobility in the ZBE during prohibited hours is conditioned by the economic capacity of the holder to proceed with the acquisition of a vehicle with an environmental label, which is not valued”. They also allege that the ordinance is based on polluting emission data from 2013, although at the time of preparing the regulations there were data from 2018.

The government’s bet

The Government has announced that it was committed to taking a step further and extending mobility restrictions to the most polluting vehicles to municipalities with more than 20,000 inhabitants. At the end of 2025, a total of 67 municipalities will have, according to the Generalitat’s proposal, a perimeter prohibited to the dirtiest cars. In Barcelona, ​​since the beginning of 2020, vehicles without any environmental label from the General Directorate of Traffic (DGT) could not access the ZBE, but the pandemic postponed the sanctions until September 2020. Now there are only a small amount of moratoriums left for trucks and buses, and the idea of ​​the council, also expressed last week, was to extend the restrictions