Glasgow LEZ: What we can learn from historic Tuscan town

Not, as in Glasgow, because they do not want them. But because they have been taken away, albeit temporarily.

Residents of the hilltop Tuscan town are moaning that one of the electronic “gates” to their new Low Traffic Zone - or ZTL in its Italian abbreviation - has been disabled because of roadworks elsewhere.

This means that once again, after months of relative tranquillity,  outsiders can drive freely in to the narrow streets of their historic centre. 

“Our towns got better, more livable when they switched on the ZTL,” one unhappy local told the area’s online paper, Cuoio in Diretta, at the end of last month.  “Now we are back to square one. Anybody can come in and not just to do their shopping.”  

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This is a familiar Italian story, told over and over again in the country’s regional press. Italy is dotted with ZTLs, for its big cities and old borghi like Fucecchio, where motorists struggle to find space to move never mind park. 

Their rules and their timings vary from place to place, from season to season. And views on how and when they should be imposed can vary. 

In nearby San Miniato - another historic tanning community in Tuscany’s Leather District - some commercial interests so cross with the ZTL, which came in to force last year, that they want it axed.

“Let’s get rid of it,” said Luca Favilli, a local representative of business lobby Confcommercio, said back in March. “It just creates inconvenience.” Glasgow's Low Emission Zone was introduced in June (Image: Newsquest)

The local authorities, he said, should show humility that the scheme was not functioning, that it was scaring visitors away. “The fear of getting a fine was deterring people from going to San Miniato,” added Favilli, "and we cannot allow that.”

The local traffic restrictions are wholesale - they prohibit all cars without permits from entering the zone rather than just those with the most polluting engines, as in Glasgow. Residents get permits. So do delivery lorries and service vehicles.

Fucecchio and San Miniato tower over the main roads and railways between Pisa and Florence, two major cities now introducing more drastic measures still to control and regulate the sheer volume of vehicles on their streets.

Across Europe there are a whole range of what are called urban vehicle access regulations or UVARs. Italy’s ZTL are the most common. 

But some of these ZTLs - including the one in place in Florence -  also include specific restrictions on vehicles that choke lungs as well as streets. 

These are more akin to what in English is called a Low Emissions Zone or LEZ. 

Florence is currently installing 78 ZTL gates - cameras - to protect its desperately over-crowded city centre, a world heritage site.

This infrastructure, called the  “Green Shield” in the local press, will initially only monitor traffic - not least fleets of tourist coaches - and enforce a ban the most polluting vehicles. This, from the beginning of this month, includes diesels made before 2015.

However, local authorities are looking at other tougher restrictions, including tolls for a wider variety of vehicles.

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Entrance tickets - if they are introduced - will be the same price as a return fare on public transport. But they will only be considered, local transport officials insisted after a new tram scheme is finished in 2026.

Even the prospect of tolls infuriated some on the political right. The local branch of Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s radical nationalist Fratelli d’Italia party late last month issued a statement describing attempts to bring forward the Green Shield as an “injustice”. 

“It is absurd to introduce ticket payments to enter the city in the face of what is still shoddy public transport,” it said, according to Tuscan daily La Nazione.

Rhetoric in towns like Florence, San Miniato and Fucecchio might sound familiar to a Scottish audience. 

As here, the debate is often framed as those who favour clean air and amenity against those who represent business interests. 

Glasgow banned non-residents from driving the most polluting vehicles in to the city in June. Edinburgh, Aberdeen and Dundee are scheduled to follow suit next summer. Scotland’s four UVARs are all LEZs. They envisage fines, not tolls. 

In Glasgow, a local garage owner has launched a legal bid against the LEZ. And, echoing Tuscan business lobbies, only last week a Conservative MSP, Annie Wells, claimed “the SNP’s botched low emissions zone may be driving people away from Glasgow City Centre.” 

Opposition politicians in Scotland have been eager to link LEZ’s to the SNP. However, such schemes are booming across Europe - far, far faster than in Scotland under the nationalists.

Scotland’s clean-air policies come after civil servants looked at hundreds of successful schemes across the continent, including Berlin’s 15-year-old ban on dirty cars. 

Italians have been arguing about various UVARs for years longer than Scots. The country, as of January, had more than 300 ZTLs. How many of these count as low emission zones? Well, estimates vary. This time last year one study, sponsored by an insurance company, suggested more than 250 of them. That would mean Italy has 10 times more LEZs than the UK. Other sources, including campaigners who are cynical about whether police and other authorities enforce clean air rules, put the actual number a little lower. 

Italy has unusually high car ownership by European standards. There were 663 private vehicles in the country per 1ooo people in 2021. That compared with 385 per 1000 in Glasgow.

Glasgow's LEZ has received mixed views (Image: Newsquest)

There are Italians who are car mad, and there are Italians who are mad about how many cars there are. Which is why there are so many rows about traffic restrictions. Polling suggests four out of five people in the country want more action on clean air.

Earlier this year Italy’s motoring capital, Turin, home of Fiat, announced plans for an environmental ZTL - an LEZ.

It aims to put up scores of camera-controlled gates around its centre, an area far bigger than that, for example, covered by the Glasgow scheme. 

Turin is struggling to raise the money to pay for its new infrastructure. Despite the often repeated complaint of motorists that they are being fleeced to raise money, ZTLs can cost more to set up and run that they raise in revenue from fines or tolls.

So it is no surprise that LEZs are most concentrated in its wealthier north, in cities like Turin, Milan, Padua and Bologna.  Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands are also enthusiastically embracing such restrictions.

There was a 40% rise in the number of low emissions zones in the European Union between 2019 and 2022. The Clean Cities Campaign, an alliance of non-governmental organisations, expects there to be more than 500 LEZs across the bloc by next year.

Part of the reason for the predicted rise is a new law in Spain ordering all urban areas with more than 50,000 inhabitants to introduce LEZs.  

Starting this year, communities all over the country are phasing in fines for cars that do not meet environmental standards.  

Crucially, the new green legislation means that even towns of 20,000 or more people have to restrict dirty vehicles if the local air quality is low. 

RTVE, Spain’s public broadcaster, has calculated that fully 53% of the country’s population live in municipalities to be covered by LEZs, more than 25m people. This includes almost all of Barcelona. By contrast, only 20,000 people live inside the small square of central Glasgow covered by the city’s restrictions. 

However, most Spanish towns and cities had not managed to install the technology needed to enforce the zones by the time the law came in to effect in January this year.

Some motorists are determined to find ways around cameras. Last week in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a local councillor spotted two women sneaking in to the city’s low emissions zone by driving the wrong way up a one-way street in front of a school. So she filmed them. They got out of their car and slapped her in the face.