This got brought up in German news this week, and it's a bit amusing how things were going to be arranged. As most of you know....we've had this diesel exhaust 'crisis' going on for two years in Germany. The argument is mostly that particle collection suggests in some areas (all urbanized) that the EU standard has been exceeded by diesel particles.
So the original idea was that the environmentalists would have forced all of the diesel cars off the road. Well....that just didn't go anywhere.
So then the idea was that you'd ban the diesel cars from entry into cities affected. In simple terms, you'd have parking lots suddenly appear, and tens of thousands of people forced onto public buses and trains to enter a metropolitan area. That just didn't go anywhere.
So then the idea was that you'd ban diesel cars from the routes where the particles were showing up in significant amounts. Oddly, these routes all involved the weather collection sites. So street 'X' and 'Y' would be on some diesel-car forbidden list.
This idea moved forward in Munich, until they sat down and looked at the street map. What the environmentalists were quietly arranging....was that four and six-lane streets were going to be forbidden for diesel cars, and the alternate route was residential areas.....so you'd have massive traffic, with more particles.....getting into houses and apartment neighborhoods. The city said this week said 'no'.....that was really stupid to fix one problem by creating a second problem.
Did the environmentalists realize what they were laying out? It's hard to say. Surely they had a map, and realized the implications of a banned street, and what the alternate would end up being.
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