Which European Cities Are Doing the Most to Improve Air Quality?

London is going up, Berlin is going down. Stockholm is staying steady and Lisbon is failing. A brand new set of European city clean air rankings have just been published—and they've managed to deliver a few surprises. The European Commission-sponsored study looked at policies promoting clean air (rather than air quality per se) in 23 E.U. cities. Part of the awkwardly named "Soot-Free for the Climate!" campaign, the rankings dredge up some familiar names—Zurich, Copenhagen, and Vienna are unsurprisingly ranked as the top three cities—but also partially shake up the E.U.'s green reputation.

For a start, sprawling, sooty London and Paris both managed to outperform compact, cycling-friendly Amsterdam. The latter city is stuck further down the list for its failure to implement a Low Emissions Zone for private vehicles. The worst performing city, meanwhile, was not in cash-strapped Southern Europe, but in the heart of the E.U.'s wealthier North, in a town that, by European capital standards, is barely a city at all. Luxembourg City scored lowest of all for its failure to meaningfully combat the dominance of cars. It's not that the 107,000-resident city has no public transit—it does and it has been promoting it—but more that its economy is overwhelmingly fueled by car commuters. With far more jobs than residents, workers drive in daily from the rest of the country and also from Belgium and France.