MADRID, March 10 (Xinhua) -- The Madrid Town Hall on Friday reintroduced the traffic restrictions established as the first level of the protocols to deal with the high levels of contamination in the air.
This first level of the anti-contamination protocol, which was approved in January 2016, restricts traffic to a maximum speed of 70 kilometers an hour on the M30 ring road into the Spanish capital and on major access roads into the city.
These protocols came into effect at 6 a.m. local time on Friday morning after two weather stations measuring the air quality in the capital detected levels of over 180 milligrams of nitrogen dioxide (NO2) for a period of more than two hours.
The Madrid Town Hall has recommended the use of public transport, while at the same time activating increased means of informing citizens, through street signs, social media, its official website, as well as those of public transport companies.
This is only the first level of the anti-contamination to be activated and with the next two days predicting warm, sunny and relatively wind-free weather, the second and third degrees of the protocol could come into force in the coming days.
These protocols include forbidding parking for non-residents within the city center, before banning private vehicles from circulating with cars whose registration ends in even numbers forbidden from driving in the center one day with those who registrations end in odd numbers not allowed to circulate the following day.
This level of the protocol was activated at the start of 2017 as the result of a similar peak in contamination levels.
