Air quality was, until recently, a headache for all Madrid mayors. Both Gallardón, Botella and Carmena saw how the city failed to comply with the European Air Quality Directive for twelve years, exceeding the annual limits in many of its stations while the lungs of Madrid residents suffered.
To avoid sanctions from the European Union, the City Council had to present a proposal for restrictions on polluting emissions. It was called Plan A and was developed during the Ahora Madrid Government, in 2017, which was complemented by the Sustainable Mobility Ordinance of 2018, which included the calendar to implement all the low-emission zones that have been developed during the last few years. The first was Madrid Central and the last, which starts this January 1, 2025, is Madrid ZBE and will prohibit the circulation of the most polluting vehicles. Although there will be exceptions and a twelve-month moratorium for residents, as we learned this Thursday.
These restrictions were never to the liking of the now mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida. The first time he tried to stop them was when he was still leader of the opposition, denouncing a mobility ordinance that ended up being overturned by the courts and that he had to redo once in power. And in 2019, shortly before the elections that elevated him, he launched a campaign for bus shelters that had the following slogan: “With Almeida, Madrid Central ends on May 26”, referring to the date of the elections, that would ultimately lead him to the mayor’s office.
Restrictions on mobility were one of the main battlehorses in those elections, held two months after citizens received the first fines for Madrid Central. Although Carmena was then the candidate with the most votes, the agreements with Vox and Ciudadanos gave Almeida the key to Cibeles and, as soon as she arrived, she tried to fulfill her electoral promise. Its Mobility Councilor, Borja Carabante, announced the second attempt to cut the first of the low-emission zones: a moratorium that would pause fines from July 2019. But an environmental complaint in the courts stopped this reversal.
This judicial defeat did not dampen Almeida’s spirit against the restrictions and after the summer he presented the Madrid 360 brand to encompass all the City Council’s environmental improvement actions. Although in practice what was still being applied was Plan A that Carmena had left and that had already been approved by the EU. And in December of that year came the third attempt: the opening to free circulation of two streets at their ends. During the electoral campaign, Almeida had also promised to open San Bernardo, but finally decided not to go further or touch that key.
Cameras that did not arrive and months of tests
In parallel to these measures, the calendar of low-emission zones was advancing and with it the first restrictions were approaching in a good part of the city, planned at the beginning of 2022 in the entire central area for cars without an environmental label (type A ). But the Madrid City Council did not arrive in time to install the cameras to control it, so the ban translated into a “strain” – as the opposition called it – for polluting vehicles for almost a year. It was the fourth attempt – this time by omission – to relax the effects of the pollution limits, while Vox used the new sanctions to try to get votes from the PP on the right.
At the end of 2022 and a few months before new elections, Almeida decided to wink at the transport sector and included in a cleaning ordinance the bull for vans with B labels in Madrid Central, whose restrictions were implemented in January 2023. The move took effect until September, when an appeal from the left shot down this fifth attempt to relax the low-emission zones.
In parallel, the Mobility area installed the cameras to control access to the M-30 and its interiors, and turned them on in January 2023, but established a testing period until June, so that no fine would reach those affected before of the elections that would decide whether Almeida had a second term. Identical strategy to the one followed in 2024 when the Madrid Low Emission Zone (ZBE) and the restrictions on any vehicle without an A label for non-residents came into force: the fines were delayed for six months, until the month of July.
The arrival of Madrid ZBE for all vehicles without an environmental label from the DGT, residents included, was scheduled for next January 1, but the Mobility area had one last ace up its sleeve to leave it almost without effect: a new period of tests, this time twelve months, so as not to have to impose any sanctions until 2026.
The best air quality data
Every time Mayor Almeida cut or relaxed some of the restrictions provided for in the Sustainable Mobility Ordinance, he argued that it was allowed by the drop in nitrogen dioxide (NO2) levels, which has been reducing year by year since Madrid Central entered in force.
Although 2019 was still a dark year for the lungs of Madrid residents, the arrival of the pandemic in 2020 and its reduction in mobility made the city come closer to complying with community regulations that year and in 2021. It fell short of fault of a station, Plaza Elíptica, around which it drew a new low emissions zone that was not initially planned, to ensure compliance in the following years.
It was not necessary: the progressive disappearance of part of the vehicles without a label from circulation was key to the decrease in NO2 levels, together with a campaign to aid decarbonization and other strategies by the council. All of this ensured that in 2022 the capital complied for the first time with EU legislation on air quality.
As the restrictions on the most polluting vehicles have been expanded throughout the city, the pollution data has been shown to be increasingly lower and this Thursday Borja Carabante stuck out his chest for having achieved “the best data in the historical series”, a 34% less NO2 than that recorded in 2019, as the October data already showed.
The city’s next challenge is in the year 2030, when a new European directive will come into force that reduces the maximum permitted NO2 levels by half. At the moment, the Madrid City Council does not plan to increase the restrictions and is confident that it will comply with them when unlabeled cars stop circulating in Madrid, on January 1, 2026. Then four years will begin to check if their calculations are true.
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