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Clean Air Plan: Driving bans in Hamburg so far inadequate

2019-12-05T16:41:35.768Z


On two roads in Hamburg apply diesel driving bans for about a year. The Higher Administrative Court of the Hanseatic City says: This is not enough to improve the air quality.



The diesel driving bans on two busy routes in the city center of Hamburg are apparently not enough to improve the air quality. This was decided by the Higher Administrative Court of the Hanseatic City and ordered a revision of the Clean Air Plan. What measures should be taken will follow from the written grounds of the judgment. This was not yet available, said the court.

In the summer of last year, Hamburg was the first major city to introduce diesel transit restrictions on two busy roads in the district of Altona to reduce nitrogen oxide pollution. Since then, these have been used in the Max-Brauer-Allee for passenger cars and trucks - with the exception of diesel vehicles with the Euro 6 emissions standard - and in the Stresemannstraße for trucks.

Hamburg can take action against the verdict

However, the city has refrained from further passage restrictions, especially in the areas of Habichtstraße and the road complex Högerdamm, Spalding and Nordkanalstraße, according to the court. The currently valid clean air plan assumes that the NO2 limit values ​​for these roads will be met by 2025 at the latest.

The court decided that a continuation was necessary. So far, however, it was only the tenor of his judgment known, against the revision of the Federal Administrative Court is possible, as a spokesman explained.

No driving bans in Essen

In Essen, however, diesel bans are for the time being off the table: Here, the German Environmental Aid (DUH), the North Rhine-Westphalian state government and the city of Essen agreed on a comparison that does not prohibit Diesel driving in the city or on the highway 40, as the Higher Administrative Court (OVG) Munster announced (Az 8 A 4951/18).

Instead, a secure compliance with the nitrogen dioxide limit in 2020 with an agreed catalog of measures can be expected, said the DUH. If this is not the case, additional measures would be included in the comparison, which may eventually lead to diesel driving bans.

Environmental track to improve air quality in Essen

According to the DUH, the agreed measures include hardware retrofitting or renewal of all public transport buses operating in Essen as well as municipal utility vehicles in the year 2020. In addition, rail and bus services are to be reinforced and the infrastructure for cycle traffic to be accelerated.

In addition, an environmental track is to be set up in Essen's city center, public transport expanded and the cycle time compressed. At the same time, fewer public parking spaces in the city center with higher parking fees should make public transport more attractive.

No driving bans on the A40

With the now closed settlement, the appeal proceedings against a judgment of the administrative court Gelsenkirchen has done. The Gelsenkirchen court ordered driving bans in Essen in 2018 and on a section of the A 40. For the affected section of motorway now also a regulation has been made. According to NRW Ministry of the Environment on the highway until 31 December 2020, no concrete measures should be ordered, in particular no driving bans. Until then, the country wants to seek the federal government for solutions.

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A concrete proposal is to include the capping of the A 40 in the section with excessively high NO 2 values ​​in the urgent needs of the Federal Transport Infrastructure Plan. If there is no result by the end of next year, further talks are planned. The settlement negotiations on the Essen Air Pollution Plan were the first in a series of talks with which the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and the DUH are seeking to find solutions for eleven other NRW cities in the coming weeks.

Source: spiegel

All tech articles on 2019-12-05

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