Cleaner air in our cities

Air pollution in major Spanish cities is a serious and thorny problem. It keeps getting worse because Spanish politicians not only tend not to take urban air pollution seriously; their obvious inclination is to shrug it off with tricks and pointless measures.

Madrid and Barcelona suffer a level of atmospheric contamination which surpasses the limits established by the European Union. The excess of nitrogen dioxide particles in the air residents of these two cities breathe is a serious threat to people's welfare. But the only measures capable of reducing the concentration of these particles necessarily involve placing restrictions on automobile traffic. These measures are commonly, and no doubt rightly, supposed to be unpopular. And mainstream politicians, such as those with a chance of winning the upcoming municipal elections, are unwilling to accept them.

Far from taking decisive action, the mayors of these two cities (a Socialist in Barcelona and a Popular Party member in Madrid) opted instead, in the first instance, to ask Brussels for a moratorium on compliance with the European directive setting limits to air pollution. This move was an obvious electoral stratagem, which the national government will be hard put to defend before the European Commission.

The case for the defense is going to be complicated and almost impossible, if we bear in mind that the moratorium stratagem was compounded in Madrid by the trick of eliminating the air-pollution measuring instruments in the worst-affected districts in a blatant attempt to doctor the results; while the Catalan regional government, now in the hands of the center-right CiU Catalan nationalists, has made the surprising decision to annul the 80-kilometer-per-hour speed limit on the access routes to Barcelona. The argument brought forth in support of this move, is that the recent government program of economic incentives to encourage car owners to replace old cars with new ones, has been so successful that it has it has clearly reduced pollution levels.

This way of looking at local politics puts our two major cities far behind in terms of the best practices, such as those that have already been implemented in London, Rome and Paris, where hard-hitting, effective measures have been taken to deal with the traffic problem. The obstinate refusal to do anything serious about the problem casts doubt on the sense of responsibility that Spanish politicians might have, since they are prepared to play with public health rather than risk losing votes.

The quarrel now going on between the mayor of Madrid, Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and Environment Minister Rosa Aguilar adds a finishing touch to this sad scenario, which will go on being played out until the Spanish public begins to demand cleaner air to breathe.