The Council of Mallorca has yet to give an indication as to measures it will adopt for limiting the number of vehicles. Limits are due to be applied from 2026. A working party from different Council departments is currently assessing the measures, a clue coming from Ibiza, where regulations are coming in this year.
The Council has said that it could well replicate some of Ibiza's measures, one of them being for vehicles that aren't registered in the Balearics. People with homes in Ibiza whose vehicle is registered outside the Balearics are only allowed to have only one vehicle per property. This is intended to reduce the number of foreign-registered cars and indeed cars that are registered elsewhere in Spain.
If a resident's relatives visit the island and bring their own car, they will have to request authorisation and pay the corresponding fee through an online system that the Council of Ibiza will be introducing shortly.
The future regulations in Mallorca will include mandatory annual studies to update the vehicle limit set for each year. The Council presented findings of a carrying capacity study some months ago and forwarded it to the government's tourism sustainability pact working parties. This indicated, for example, that 324,623 vehicles with drivers entered Mallorca's ports in 2023, 108% more than in 2017. On top of these, another 55,000 entered as freight. These vehicles represented 40% of the island's cars.
On a peak day in August, the roads handled 1.3 million trips, and there were days when there were more than 75,000 hire cars on the roads. The study concluded that, on peak dates, there were between 90,000 and 120,000 excess vehicles because the roads could not handle this volume of traffic.
The Council has been criticised for not implementing measures this year, given that it had gathered the relevant data. This said, regulations it intends to apply need approval from the Balearic Parliament. Legislation is therefore being drafted. The Partido Popular at the Council of Mallorca (and the Balearic Government) hope to gain the support of opposition parties, as Vox, who form part of the Council's governing administration, have rejected proposals and are likely to also reject them in parliament.
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I live in Alcudia & in the last few years,I've notice more & more French & German cars . These are arriving on the Yellow " car transporter " ferry from France. It's just full of foreign cars. Why was this company even given permission to start a route from Toulon to Alcudia ? It's insane, we are just inviting more & more cars to arrive, totally uncontrolled. We already had enough arriving from Barcelona. It needs to STOP, we cannot handle the sheer volume of cars arriving .
Has anyone else noticed what’s happening at the airport car park? Rental cars used to be solely on the ground floor. The rest of the park levels were for ordinary local cars/people. Now (the beginning of the season) it appears that only the top floor is available for ordinary parking - all the other floors are for rental cars. Which is too much!! And it’s gonna cause huge problems and guess what??? Protests.
Everyone’s talking about the need to limit foreign vehicles in Mallorca as if tourists and second-home owners are the root of the island’s traffic crisis. But let’s be honest: many of Mallorca’s transport problems are homegrown—and no one wants to admit it. Let’s start with the absurd state of taxi licensing. Palma and Calvià—two areas practically joined at the hip—have completely separate taxi systems. A taxi from Palma that drops off in Calvià must return empty, forbidden from picking up a waiting passenger at the same location. Multiply that by hundreds of daily journeys and what do you get? A self-inflicted surge in unnecessary traffic, emissions, and cost. Then there’s the farce of ride-hailing. Uber and similar services exist in name only. Thanks to suffocating regulation—30-minute minimum wait times, excessive base charges, and bureaucratic hurdles—they’re neutered. The result? No competition, no innovation, and no incentive for the island’s taxis to improve. Taxis show up late, cancel without warning, and operate like they’re doing you a favour. Meanwhile, residents like myself would happily ditch our cars if we could rely on a liberalised, responsive, and modern transport service. So before the government points fingers at outsiders for clogging up the roads, it might want to look in the mirror. The current system rewards inefficiency and protects the status quo at the expense of residents, tourists, the environment—and common sense. If Mallorca truly wants to reduce traffic, it doesn’t need more bans and bureaucracy. It needs freedom of movement—for people, for ideas, and yes, for taxis too.
The Balearic population has grown 40% in the past 20 years. During that time there has been little significant road enlargement in the greater Palma area. Whilst there have been certain smaller regional road building and improvement projects in Mallorca as a whole, road construction hasn't matched population growth whatsoever. So the current traffic conditions should be no surprise. Outsiders' cars and rental cars are only a small part of the issue. But it's easy for the government to blame them, as there is little cost in parrying the blame somewhere else. Whereas, constructing new and improved roads is a very expensive task, which successive governments have failed to provide.
Why is it that the Balearic government is always going to act sometime in the future, maybe next year, maybe the year after. Not actually doing something now, when it's obvious this is an urgent situation.
The sooner meaningful actions are implemented the better for everybody, but they must be actions that actually reduce the number of vehicles - not just extra taxes that leads to more government revenue, but a negligible decrease in the number of vehicles.
At last a possible start to reduce the number of vehicles , on the small Island of Mallorca.
Shitty old Vox again