Pollution row gets an airing ahead of mayoral elections in May

The fallout from Madrid's pollution war has been immediate. A day after Environment Minister Rosa Aguilar challenged the capital's City Hall to tackle Madrid's "dreadful air quality," serving Mayor Alberto Ruiz Gallardón presented the fruits of a three-year labor formulated by 50 experts in urban planning, architecture, economy and sociology, among others. The paper, Madrid Downtown Project, is not a plan per se, but a plan of ideas.

The proposed project covers the area built up during Madrid's urban boom in the 1950s, bordered by the M-30 beltway to the south, east and west and the axis of Silesio Delgado and Meteo Inurria streets to the north. A 51-square-kilometer total, it includes the neighborhoods of Salamanca, Retiro, Downtown, Chamberí, Chamartín, Arganzuela and part of Moncola-Aravaca.

Mayoral candidate Lissavetzky: "We don't need to take an inventory of the dust"

Among the ideas in the proposal?some bold, others faintly utopic?is a clear and inalienable push to limit traffic in the choked thoroughfares of the capital. This will entail "the specialization of some of the city's streets," said José María Ezquiaga, one of the project directors. "That is to say, demarcating some streets for traffic, and others for residents." In a nutshell, the idea is to concentrate traffic on the periphery of the city, and return central streets to the pedestrian.

It is an issue that will gather political capital in the run-up to municipal elections on May 22. Jaime Lissavetzky, the secretary of state for sport and Socialist candidate to the mayoralty, has promised to make pollution a priority if he is elected. His plan is much the same: limit traffic on days when the suspended-particle limits are usually exceeded, pedestrianization of the center, and dissuasive costs for parking. "We don't need to take an inventory of the dust," Lissavetzky said on Wednesday.

Incumbent Gallardón has also been busy: "We have begun a reflection so that we can adopt decisions today in the sphere of our responsibility," the Popular Party mayor said. "This paper represents the most important work of the next legislature; the definitive design of the city through a general plan. It's a task that begins today, but will never end."

NGO Ecologists in Action points to the "flagrant and constant" disregard for EU pollution limits, which Madrid has exceeded every year since 2000. In 2009 the discrepancy was 13 micrograms of NO2 per cubic meter above the legal limit. Last year this fell to an annual excess of four milligrams - largely because the City Hall moved many monitoring stations out of the center, and got rid of others entirely.