The Munich city council made a decision this Wednesday that first of all formulated a great hope: May the air in the city finally become cleaner! The expansion and tightening of the driving bans for aging cars with diesel engines does not mean much at first, because the number of exceptions that are granted is so high that the cheese can hardly be seen from the holes. And the hint that all the conditions can hardly be checked anyway is another, well-calculated calming pill to all potential anger diesels: They don’t look that closely! At least not yet.
In the first step, the “No” to old diesel engines is above all a signal: We stink, please stay out! Maybe that’s already enough to pacify the environmental organizations who are willing to sue and to push the air values around the Mittlerer Ring into the permitted range, after all the nitrogen oxide values have been falling continuously recently because new vehicles simply emit less of it.
If this trend continues, green-red could get off lightly. Then the town hall coalition can claim to have found a crunchy but ultimately wise compromise. Ignoring the guidelines and judgments on the air values would have been unsustainable in the long term and probably very expensive. Banning all problematic diesels as a first step would have been consistent from an environmental point of view, but fatal from a socio-political point of view, especially in view of the rapidly rising prices for the citizens. That much determination would probably have given the right-wing political fringe a lot of support. This is how the ban came about, which isn’t really a ban at first, but a bet on falling pollutant levels without too many interventions.
The exciting question is: what if the bet doesn’t work out? The second stage of the ban, which will come on October 1, 2023 if the limit values are not met, but above all the third, which may be due on April 1, 2024, severely restrict the freedom of movement of many diesel owners. For them, the streets of the city would actually become no-go areas. With far-reaching consequences, including socio-political ones.