Faced with a health and environmental emergency, a large European city has chosen to reset the cost of public transport. This is what is happening in Geneva, where the cantonal authorities have made bus, trams, trains and free boats for residents and visitors. The decision is not a promotional initiative, but a response to an acute peak of ozone pollution that has made the air potentially harmful to health.
The measure was triggered following extreme climatic conditions. With the mercury column that reached 37 degrees Celsius, the city found itself facing a concentration of tropospheric ozone higher than the health alert threshold, fixed to 180 micrograms per cubic meter.
Since 2020, the canton provides for the free transport of transport on the day following the exceeding of the 180 μg/m3 threshold of Ozono. Today this condition has been widely overcome: the Meyrin (GE) detection station recorded almost 230 μg/m3, reads on Swissinfo.ch.
This gas, often called “summer smog”, is formed when the pollutants emitted mainly by vehicular traffic, such as nitrogen oxides, chemically react under the effect of an intense solar radiation and high temperatures. The World Health Organization highlights its danger: it can cause respiratory problems, headaches and asthma crises, with a significant impact on the population, especially on the most vulnerable subjects.
The goal of the measure is clear and strategic: to break down polluting emissions in the fastest and most effective way possible. By making public mobility, a powerful incentive is created to leave the private car at home, the main responsible for the production of the precursors of the ozone in the urban area. In this way, we intervene directly at the source of the problem. The office for the environment of the Canton of Geneva has declared in an official note that “the measures adopted as part of this emergency protocol aim to reduce nitrogen oxide emissions, in particular by promoting public transport and limiting the circulation of the most polluting vehicles”.
In fact, the gratuity of the means is not an isolated action. The emergency protocol activated by the Geneva Authorities also provides, from 6:00 to 22:00, the ban on the circulation in the center for vehicles that do not respect certain issues of issue. It is therefore an integrated strategy that combines a strong incentive (free) with a precise restriction (the blocking of the most polluting vehicles), with the aim of maximizing the impact on air quality. For the entire duration of the alert, the tickets of the tickets aboard the vehicles are suspended.
A replicable model?
Beyond its immediate result, which will be measured with specific data, the Geneva initiative establishes a precedent of considerable importance. For the first time, the gratuity of public transport is used not as a long -term welfare measure, but as a public health tool. The concept that emerges is that, in conditions of acute environmental crisis, the right to health and a clean air assumes a priority that can temporarily climb the normal logical logical logical of a public service.
This model introduces a new perspective in the management of smog emergencies, increasingly frequent in torrid summers from all over Europe. It shows that the administrations have powerful levers of action, capable of modifying the behaviors of citizens on a large scale in a very short time. The Geneva approach moves the responsibility from the individual, to whom it is usually recommended not to expose himself to the community, offering a practical and universal solution to actively contribute to the reduction of pollution.
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