After much campaigning by FFMC (MAG’s sister organisation in France) we hear that the French Government have now scrapped the idea of banning older vehicles from city centres.
The original idea was that 8 major cities in France would introduce access restrictions on bikes built before 2004 under the guise of improving air quality.
This was a non sensical idea given that bikes of any age will always be moving in an urban area and never add to congestion and thus increased pollution in the way that stationary cars do, no matter how new they are.
The move would also have penalised those who chose older bikes for financial reasons, or, perversely, because they felt the carbon footprint of producing a completely new machine, was an environmental price they didn’t want to pay.