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Brussels and Antwerp to ban polluting cars from city centre
The City of Brussels wants to start as early as next year with the implementation of a “low emissions zone” in its city centre. Antwerp would like to do the same, possibly from 2016, but the details for both cities still need to be worked out, reports De Tijd.
With the initiative, Brussels and Antwerp would join other major cities, such as Paris which aims to ban all diesel engines from its city centre by 2020. It won’t happen that quickly in Brussels, says Céline Fremault, spokesperson for the Brussels Environment Minister. “There are just too many diesel cars in Belgium.”
In the short term, Brussels plans to start with a low emissions zone in 2015. Antwerp is giving itself until 2016 to ban old, polluting cars from its city centre. Violators would be fined, but that’s as far as the details of the plan are known.
So far, Antwerp and Brussels are the only Belgian cities with such plans.
Comments
"Violators will be fined." This will NEVER HAPPEN. The police do not penalize drivers who run red lights, make illegal turns, jump the lights, speed, and more. Taxis are the worst offenders. Brussels needs to invest in hundreds of CCTV cameras so the police are not subjectively handing out tickets and wasting their time. Let technology catch the wrongdoers, including the diesel engine cars in the near future. Belgium loves to pass laws and make rules but they NEVER APPLY THEM. The whole country is "reactive" and never "proactive".
@Salsadancer --- Laws start as draft-projects and take a while before they truly get implemented. This being the case everywhere (In some countries they never get implemented at all...). Moreover: this country may be small but statements about "the whole country" sound a little "sweeping", somehow... If what you say about taxis is absolutely true ("worse than an ambulance") and behaviour on the road tends to be erratic (ask Prince Laurent!)
When the ban on smoking in pubs came in to place in the UK, with the exception of a few high profile token protests, smoking in pubs stopped.
In Belgium, last night, I walk in to a pub to be greeted by a foul carcinogenic fog, the barman smoking like a chimney behind the bar.
It's kind of indicative of the Belgian attitude to Laws, as was the fact that everybody in there would be driving drunk within the hour.