About a half-hour drive north of my residence in Germany is the town of Limburg (Hessen city of 36k people....general size of 45 square kilometers).
My description of the town? It's a historical place and the old town area is worth a field trip of four hours to walk around. There's no bad part of town. Coffee shops, cafes, restaurants, and pubs? In abundance.
It's a town where probably 99-percent of people are happy.
So they have this problem and in the past month or two....it's gotten a lot of hype. HR picked up the story is the basis of the hype.
The city has a number of weather stations/air collection sites. Over the past couple of years, with EU rules on clean air....the city has a problem.
The nitrate dioxide levels....year after year.....have exceeded the EU standards.
Some folks used the data and the standard, and are pushing now to have the whole mid-town area declared as a banned-area for cars.
The city reaction? Well....reality has sunk in and they are pretty disturbed over where this is going.
A pretty fair area (near the B8 leading through midtown) will be declared off-limits to older diesel cars....as the regulation goes into place.
What'll happen as the regulation occurs? The mayor figures that these people will detour around the affected area, and present new and higher numbers for other parts of town....plus increasing the rate of traffic in areas which didn't have that much traffic before.
Alternate measures? What the city talks about is a project or two which would take at least ten years, and the environmental folks aren't willing to wait.
The funny thing as you look at the mess....this is a story which designed public access...public parking....easy routes through the city, and all that work (for forty-odd years) has reached a point where the value is near zero.
The odds that businesses, restaurants, bars, etc.....will lose business over the next decade because of the dirty air standard? I would go and suggest that people will be shocked in a decade as places pack up and move a mile or two outside of the city limits.
2 comments:
What about driving only one day for odd plate numbers one day for even plate numbers, that was the way the communists were preventing the gas shortage during the 80’s back home.
This EU regulation and the intensity of the 'fight' has reached a level where you couldn't do the odd plate number idea. I think a fair sized element of the environmental folks want a segment of the inner-city (say 600 by 600 meter) just blocked off from all car traffic except those who live there.
If you gaze around Germany, there's a minimum of 100 cities which have this problem approaching and gutting traffic seems to be the ultimate goal. The group doesn't grasp that all of these towns have a commerce function, and without cashflow....the urban areas will turn into ghost towns.
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