Low Emission Zones in Europe: What OpenStreetMap Maps, Country by Country

On 28 September 2026 Italy's government published a decree-law that pushed back a winter restriction on Euro 5 diesel cars in its four Po Valley regions by one year. That kind of change is common: low emission zones in Europe open, tighten, pause and close every few months, and each country publishes its rules in its own format.

The closest thing to a shared map is OpenStreetMap. We counted every low emission zone mapped there on 29 September 2026. Europe holds 177 of the 191 zone areas mapped worldwide, spread across 14 countries. Merging pieces of the same zone leaves 170. Spain leads with 46, then Germany with 35 and France with 28.

This article gives the count per country, checks it against four official lists, and shows how much of the data a router or navigation app could actually use.

How low emission zones are tagged in OpenStreetMap

A low emission zone is an area where a city or region restricts vehicles by their emission class. In OpenStreetMap it is a closed area, usually a boundary relation, with the tag boundary=low_emission_zone. Warsaw's clean transport zone is a good example of a fully tagged one:

type=boundary
boundary=low_emission_zone
name=Strefa Czystego Transportu
start_date=2024-07-01
motor_vehicle:conditional=no @ (fuel=diesel AND emissions<euro_4; fuel=petrol AND emissions<euro_2)
website=https://transport.um.warszawa.pl/sct

The motor_vehicle:conditional line matters most. It says, in a syntax software can parse, that diesel vehicles below Euro 4 and petrol vehicles below Euro 2 may not enter. Many zones stop at the name and the outline.

Taginfo counted 545 objects with this tag worldwide on 29 September 2026. That figure mixes whole zones with the individual lines that make up their outlines, so we counted zones directly (method below).

Low emission zones per country

Zones mapped in OpenStreetMap on 29 September 2026, by country:

"Areas" counts zone objects in OpenStreetMap. "Distinct" merges objects with the same name in one country. "Rules" counts zones whose vehicle restriction is in a machine-readable :conditional tag, and "Start date" those with a start_date tag. The Netherlands drops from 24 to 17 because Amsterdam's zone is drawn as seven separate pieces and Rotterdam's as two. No other European country had a zone mapped with this tag.

A few things stand out:

• Spain's list is young. Of the 37 Spanish zones with a start_date, 22 give a date in 2025 or 2026. Spain's climate law, Ley 7/2021, article 14.3, requires low emission zones in every municipality over 50,000 inhabitants and in island territories, and in municipalities over 20,000 where air quality limits are exceeded. Two zones in Talavera de la Reina are tagged to start on 14 October 2026.
• France maps outlines, not rules. 25 of the 28 French zones describe their Crit'Air threshold only in a free-text access:note, such as crit'air>=5. Half of them have no name.
• Greece's entries are traffic rings. The six Athens objects include the Δακτύλιος, which restricts cars by odd and even plate numbers rather than by emission class.

How the map compares with official lists

A count only means something next to a reference. We checked four countries whose governments publish a current list:

Denmark and Scotland are complete. England's gap is Bradford and Portsmouth, which have no zone object. The other UK entries are London's Low Emission Zone, two zero emission zones in Oxford and Hackney and Islington, and the four Scottish zones.

Germany is the most instructive case, because both errors appear:

• Missing: Darmstadt, Dinslaken, Langenfeld, Marburg and Wuppertal are active according to the Umweltbundesamt but have no zone of their own in OpenStreetMap.
• Still mapped after closing: the Umweltbundesamt lists Mainz as lifted on 1 October 2025 and Erfurt as lifted on 1 May 2021. Both zones are still in the map, with no end date.
• Duplicates and neighbours: Bochum and Bottrop each have their own zone although both sit inside the combined Ruhr area zone, and a Stuttgart truck through-traffic ban carries the same tag.

That makes 30 correct zones plus 5 that should not be counted, which is how Germany reaches 35 in the table.

The pattern is typical of volunteer data about rules. A new zone gets mapped because people notice the signs. A lifted zone stays, because nothing on the street prompts anyone to delete it.

Only a quarter of zones carry rules software can read

For a driver, the outline is half the answer. The other half is whether their car may enter. Across Europe, 43 of the 177 zones (24%) carry their vehicle restriction in a machine-readable :conditional tag, and 23 of those 43 are Dutch.

The other countries mostly use shortcuts:

• Germany: 21 zones carry access=green_sticker_germany. The wiki page for the tag does not document that value, and software has to know the German sticker system to use it.
• France: Crit'Air thresholds sit in free text, as described above.
• Denmark: all four zones are mapped, but none carries the rule. Miljøstyrelsen's site says diesel cars need a particle filter or at least Euro 5.

Rules also change on a timetable that outlines do not. Italy is the clearest example this week.

Italy: a rule that does not fit on a map

Decree-law 121/2023, article 1(2) lets Piedmont, Lombardy, Veneto and Emilia-Romagna restrict Euro 5 diesel vehicles every year from 1 October to 31 March. It applies mainly in urban areas of municipalities with more than 100,000 inhabitants and adequate public transport, where PM10 or NO2 limits are exceeded. The start date was 1 October 2026. Decree-law no. 167 of 28 September 2026, published in the Gazzetta Ufficiale the same day, replaced it with 1 October 2027.

None of this appears in OpenStreetMap, and it would be hard to map. The rule is seasonal, applies by municipality and depends on measured pollution, so no single polygon captures it. Italy's nine mapped zones are city schemes: Milan's Area B and Area C, Rome's Fascia Verde, Florence's Scudo Verde, and five smaller zones in Modena, Liguria and Tuscany.

Search interest shows how many people this affects. In Italy, "blocco diesel euro 5" (Euro 5 diesel ban) averaged 9,900 searches a month over the past year and peaked at 110,000 in June 2026, according to DataForSEO keyword data.

Query the zones yourself

Paste this into overpass-turbo.eu and replace DE with the two-letter ISO code of any country:

[out:json][timeout:90];
area["ISO3166-1"="DE"][admin_level=2]->.country;
nwr["boundary"="low_emission_zone"](area.country);
out geom;

The result contains every mapped zone in that country, with its outline, and exports to GeoJSON. It needs no API key. Keep to one country per query, because the public Overpass servers are shared and throttle heavy use. Before relying on a zone, open the page in its website tag. 75 of the 177 European zones link to the city's own page, and more cite the local order in a source tag.

If you would rather not run a query, the buttons under the map above download all 177 European zones as one GeoJSON file, or as a CSV list with each zone's country, name, start date, operator, rule status, area and OpenStreetMap link.

Method and limits

• Source: every object tagged boundary=low_emission_zone, downloaded from the Overpass API on 29 September 2026 (OpenStreetMap data as of 17:19 UTC).
• What counts as a zone: a relation, or a closed way that is not part of a zone relation. We left out 30 European objects: 22 open lines, mostly road segments tagged by mistake, and 8 points marking limited traffic zones in Matera.
• Country: the country containing the zone's centre, using Natural Earth 1:10m boundaries.
• Machine-readable rules: a zone counts if it has a motor_vehicle, hgv, vehicle, access, bus, goods or moped :conditional tag.
• Map and downloads: built from a second download on 29 September 2026 (data as of 17:54 UTC), which gave the same counts. Outlines are simplified to roughly 50 metres to keep the file small, and the CSV areas are computed from the full outlines.
• Official lists: fetched from the pages linked above on 29 September 2026.
• What the numbers do not measure: how many zones exist in countries without a current national list, whether each mapped outline matches the legal boundary, or which vehicles may enter today. Italy's many limited traffic zones (ZTL) use a separate tag and are not counted here.

Related

The same approach, counting what volunteers have mapped and checking it against official figures, is behind our article on ALPR and Flock cameras in OpenStreetMap and our traffic enforcement camera dataset, which you can browse in the camera index. To see what lies within reach of an address, try the radius map or the travel time map.