Abstract

In the European Union there are more than 200 experiences of cities that have a Low Emission Zone, as a mechanism to reduce pollution caused by traffic in urban areas. This instrument adopts different names, "clean air zones", "environmental zones", "limited traffic zones", etc., but they all have in common the establishment of restrictions on urban transit.

Specifically, the Spanish regulations foresee that ZBEs are established in cities with more than 50,000 inhabitants, and therefore it will become a widely generalized tool.

At the same time, a broad consensus is gradually being consolidated on the need to assess the social impact of the actions that are carried out, especially in the field of public management, where decisions have been to justify based on the interests of the citizens.

This presentation presents an analysis of this impact based on the application of a Cost Benefit Analysis (CBA), a microeconomic approach that is contextualized within the welfare economy and that aims to reproduce, on a social scale, the behavior of a rational agent when comparing the advantages and disadvantages of an economic action

This approach integrates all the impacts that the project has on society, in the form of benefits and social costs, valued monetarily, to estimate the resulting effect or the net social benefit of its development. This monetization is the basis of ACB methods, as it is the unit of account that allows heterogeneous benefits and costs to be compared. It is, therefore, a criterion for making collective decisions considering the aggregated individual preferences, expressed economically, either by the willingness to pay or by the costs avoided due to the differential effects that will predictably occur.

This methodology will be applied to the Low Emissions Zone of the Rondes de Barcelona. A double result is intended. On the one hand, explain how this methodology can be applied to the analysis of a ZBE and its limitations. On the other hand, to obtain results to quantify the net impact of its implementation on the well-being of the population. In other words, comparing the benefits it generates with the costs derived from its establishment.

The conclusions of the work show that it is a positive action, in the sense that the environmental benefits it generates compensate, in sufficiently significant figures, the costs of carrying it out. Therefore, they generate a net positive impact on well-being.

But the fact that the global balance is positive does not mean that it is positive for all the agents involved. Therefore, although it is not part of the scope of this work, it must be taken into account, in order to develop complementary actions that can limit the opposition of groups directly affected.