Lisbon bars cars from driving through city centre

This month, Lisbon will become the latest European city to bar through-traffic from its city centre.

The plan, to be introduced for a three-month trial period on Apr 26, will see cars barred from driving through (but not from driving to) the heart of Lisbon’s downtown.

A larger zone beyond this will bar access to most vehicles over 3.5 tonnes – including tourist buses but excluding all forms of public transit – between 8 am and 8 pm.

After the zones’ introduction, cars trying to cross town will instead be directed to a semi-circular ring of major roads just beyond Lisbon’s downtown, which will act as a de facto beltway. While the plan will not be a complete car ban, it could significantly reduce traffic through the Portuguese capital’s historic heart.

These changes are happening in a somewhat tentative, under-the-radar fashion. Lisbon Deputy Mayor for Mobility Anacoreta Correia has stressed that the plan “is dynamic, it does not have an end in sight and will change as the completion of the works progresses”. 

The zones are being justified with reasons that even the most avid devotee of private cars might see the sense of: This summer, central Lisbon is undergoing substantial major construction, including a metro extension that will create two new stations, an installation of new storm drains to prevent flooding along the city’s waterfront, street resurfacing, and work on the sewers. These combined disruptions risk clogging roads, especially if traffic continues circulating as normal.

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There is nonetheless a greater sense of change in the air than this short-term pragmatism alone might suggest. The city has said that at least some of the measures will be maintained in perpetuity, with the ban on daytime heavy goods vehicles almost definitely intended to be permanent. Lisbon’s current metro extension works will also continue on two further lines in the near future, meaning the sort of disruption to the central road system that the city faces this summer could well be ongoing.

As some Portuguese transit experts have pointed out, the plan could also help Lisbon reach the challenging goal of becoming carbon-neutral by 2030, a target that was actively promoted by Lisbon Mayor Carlos Moedas in his previous role as European Union (EU) Commissioner for Research, Science and Innovation.  

The city is one of 122 EU cities that have pledged to achieve this goal.

Whether or not Lisbon’s current construction is a pretext for the policy changes, they do not put the city at the vanguard of car-banning policies. Paris and Amsterdam are already introducing measures to bar inner city through-traffic, while London has long had a strong deterrent to central through-traffic in the form of its congestion charge.

Across major European cities, it is starting to look as if the habit of driving through central urban zones en route to somewhere else could soon become a thing of the past. BLOOMBERG