The city council of Amsterdam plans to ban petrol and diesel cars and motorbikes from its streets from 2030, The Guardian reports.
The capital city of the Netherlands is looking to reduce air pollution, which local authorities claim shortens the life expectancy of local residents by as much as one year.
Starting in 2020, diesel cars 15 years or older will be banned from going within the A10 ring road around Amsterdam while from 2022, no public buses or coaches powered by petrol or diesel will be allowed in the city center. In 2025, the ban will be extended to includes pleasure crafts on its canals as well as mopeds and light mopeds. The Clean Air Action plan then calls for all traffic within the city to be emission-free by 2030.
In a bid to encourage locals to make the switch to electric and hydrogen vehicles, the city wants to offer charging stations to every buyer of an emission-free vehicle. Estimates predict the city will need between 16,000 and 23,000 charging stations by 2025 for the project to be viable.
The plan hasn’t pleased everyone and according to a spokesman from the Rai Association, an automotive industry lobby group, many people won’t be able to afford EVs.
“Many tens of thousands of families who have no money for an electric car will soon be left out in the cold. That makes Amsterdam a city of the rich. In 2030, about one-third of the cars will be electric, we expect. But there will also be a lot of people who won’t be able to afford that by then,” the spokesman said.