Pollution prompts car ban prospect

FREE public transport in Paris will continue tomorrow as authorities battle to curb air pollution in the capital.

Meanwhile, a decision on whether to impose a partial ban on cars entering the city on Monday if conditions do not improve will be made on Saturday evening.

Le Figaro reports the cost of providing free public transportation over the weekend will be €6million. The government footed half the bill for free transport during last year’s pollution crisis in the capital.

Air quality in the capital is improving. On Wednesday, air pollution in Paris scored 125 on the Plume Labs index, which monitors air quality in dozens of cities across the world. According to Plume Labs’ figures, the city briefly become the most polluted in the world.

Any score over 100 on Plume Labs’ index is considered “harmful”, while figures over 150 are “critical”.

Today, air pollution levels rated a score of 93 on the index, Le Parisien reports.

Ecology minister Ségolène Royal announced yesterday that a partial traffic ban would be enforced on Monday if pollution levels do not fall over the weekend. It has emerged that Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo wanted a ban to be implemented on Friday but her request was denied.

A second request to implement a vehicle ban today was also rejected - despite the Mayor saying that, "all clean vehicles, including electric and hybrid, and vehicles carrying more than three people will always be allowed to travel”.

Although pollution levels have eased as the smog that clouded Paris and a swathe of northwest France dissipated since peaking on Wednesday, levels of PM10 particles remain high, and the weather is not in the city’s favour.

March has been relatively dry in the capital, and as temperatures rise, pollution levels have risen. A few days of rain would wash the particles out of the air, but no rain is forecast.

In the long term, the city has unveiled plans to ban the most polluting cars and lorries and is working to improve public transport.

The capital’s air pollution monitor AirParif has insisted that air quality in Paris is generally better than other cities that regularly top global air pollution lists.

“We have pollution issues, but lots of other cities do too,” said an Airparif spokeswoman, adding that Wednesday’s spike was unusually high.

“Air quality in the French capital is generally better than a decade ago. It’s wrong to compare a city at a certain moment when you have meteorological conditions that could make the pollution worse at that point.”

Plume Labs’ app, she said “provides hourly pollution level updates in 111 cities”, but she warned that instant information like this “cannot be used to make comparisons”.

“The only way to compare pollution levels is to average over the year,” she said.

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Photo: Martin Cooper