Mexico City orders all cars out of road once a week amid smog alert
MEXICO CITY — Metropolitan authorities on Wednesday temporarily ordered all cars to remain idle one day a week in response to this notoriously smoggy capital’s worst airquality crisis in over a decade.
Until now vehicles have been exempt from Mexico City’s “no circulation” rules if owners obtain a holographic sticker from a smog-check centre certifying them as loweremission.
But the Environmental Commission of the Megalopolis, a cross-government agency comprising the capital and surrounding suburbs that together are home to more than 20 million people, said in a statement that all cars must now comply, even if they have the exemption sticker. Vehicles will also be forced from the roads one Saturday a month. It also lowered the threshold at which alerts will be declared and predicted that atmospheric conditions will continue to favour the build-up of contaminants during the current dry season.
The measure takes effect on Tuesday and runs until June 30, around the time that summer rains typically arrive and improve the region’s air quality significantly.
Officials have been meeting to consider anti-pollution measures since a Phase 1 emergency due to high ozone levels — the first since 2005 — was declared two weeks ago, when warm temperatures and still air left pollution trapped in Mexico City’s volcano-ringed valley.
At the time, government offi- cials and environmental activists pinned at least some of the blame on a Supreme Court decision last year that overturned a rule barring all cars over eight years old from the streets one day a week.
The ruling is said to have put an extra 1.4 million vehicles back on the roads each day. Smog levels dropped significantly during Easter Week, when much of Mexico City empties out due to the holiday. But on Wednesday afternoon authorities were reporting a pollution index of 108 — officially “bad,” though about half the levels recorded at the peak of the Phase 1 alert.