Fewer (polluting) cars and more bicycles. The Barcelona Metropolitan Area (AMB) council has approved this Tuesday the new Metropolitan Urban Mobility Plan (PMMU) 2025-2030, which foresees restricting the passage of vehicles with a yellow sticker through low-emission zones (ZBE) within two years, in 2028. It is the second attempt to deploy this protection belt for air quality, after the pandemic frustrated the initial plan to extend the ban to the yellow sticker as early as 2022. The AMB's proposal is based on the Generalitat's current regulatory framework, which obliges cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants to limit this type of vehicle, first for cars and motorcycles and, later (in 2030), for heavy vehicles. However, the same entity admits that it does not have the capacity to force municipalities to apply the restrictions, nor to make use of the sanctioning regime.

Although Pedro Navarro, director of the DGT, He asserted a year ago that the process of redefining the classification system The environmental labeling scheme was already in place and seemed unstoppable; however, the Congress of Deputies approved the new Sustainable Mobility Law last week without including the fifteenth additional provision, which was supposed to allow the Directorate General of Traffic to establish the appropriate mechanisms to modify the criteria for assigning environmental labels to new vehicles.

The age of the car fleet circulating on our roads continues to grow and now stands at an average of 14.5 years, a figure 0.3 years higher than the 14.2 years recorded in 2023. This figure is even higher if we analyse the rest of the vehicles. We find that industrial vehicles are the oldest in the fleet with an average of 15.1 years, but not far behind commercial vehicles, with 14.7 years. As for buses, they are the youngest with an average of 11.5 years.