Vehicles classified Crit'Air 3, which will be prohibited from circulation in the low-emission zone (ZFE) of Greater Paris on 1is January 2025 to reduce air pollution, will be able to deviate from these new restrictions 24 days a year, the metropolis announced on Monday.
Motorists holding a Crit'Air 3 vehicle (air quality certificate), i.e. diesel cars registered before 2011 and gasoline cars before 2006, will also be exempt from inspections for one year, according to the The order establishing the ZFE presented by the president of the Greater Paris Metropolis (MGP), Patrick Ollier, during a metropolitan council.
He said to himself “extremely disappointed” by the government's decision to eliminate, through a decree at the beginning of December, the conversion bonuses for the purchase of a low-polluting vehicle, aid that the metropolis had until then supplemented. This aid will thus fall from 22,000 euros to 10,000 euros, lamented Mr. Ollier, asking the government to “review your roadmap” to help set up the EPZ.
Read also | Article reserved for our subscribers Apart from Paris and Lyon, no urban area will have to strengthen its low-emission zone
Read later
“Abandonment of the State”
The device is judged “socially risky” by all the elected representatives of the metropolis, who denounce “abandonment of the State”as Sylvain Raifaud, president of the environmental group at MGP, told Agence France-Presse. More than 420,000 vehicles are affected by these new restrictions, already applied to Crit'Air 4 and 5 stickers. The ZFE includes a large part of Greater Paris, i.e. 77 municipalities out of the 131 in the metropolis, within the perimeter formed by the A86 motorway, Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m.
Additional flexibilities will also be granted to professionals, according to a list of 22 socio-economic categories. Twelve large French cities have already set up an ZFE. Only the Paris and Lyon metropolitan areas are obliged to limit the circulation of Crit'Air 3 vehicles from 1is January, because they exceed the pollution thresholds for two types of pollutants (fine particles and nitrogen dioxide).
The system, governed by the 2019 climate and resilience law, aims to reduce air pollution and its effects on health. Some “4,970 premature deaths per year in the Greater Paris metropolis could be avoided if WHO recommendations were respected”according to the public consultation launched by the MGP.
