Driving in Karlovy Vary: Limited traffic zone

Karlovy Vary, Czechia · Limited traffic zone

Official name Lázeňské území – vymezená část vnitřního území lázeňského místa Karlovy Vary

What applies

The spa quarter of Karlovy Vary is closed to motor vehicles by traffic sign, and the city's ordinance sets the price of the permit that lets you in. It is the only Czech scheme in this corpus that draws its own boundary in words: thirty-three streets and squares are listed, from Stará louka and Lázeňská along the colonnades to Zámecký vrch, Divadelní náměstí and Vřídelní.

A permit costs 100 Kč per vehicle for each started day, or 2 000 Kč for 30 days, 4 000 Kč for 90 days and 14 000 Kč for a year. Single permits of one to seven consecutive days can be bought from machines or a mobile app instead of at the counter.

Battery-electric vehicles need no permit at all, and neither do buses and marked service vehicles of the city transport operator, emergency vehicles, a doctor on a home visit, or a spa guest staying inside the zone — on the day of arrival and the day of departure only. Residents, property owners and their families, businesses using property inside the zone, and holders of a ZTP or ZTP/P disability card pay nothing.

The ordinance has been in force since 13 July 2022 and the national register records it as Platné.

Source: Statutární město Karlovy Vary, read 2026-09-15
Full citation

Statutární město Karlovy Vary — Obecně závazná vyhláška č. 7/2022 o místním poplatku za povolení k vjezdu s motorovým vozidlem do vybraných míst a částí měst, čl. 1 to čl. 10, as deposited in the Ministry of the Interior's national register of municipal legislation (SPP). The watched strings are on the register's result page for this city and this subject area; the wording itself is in the .docx the register serves at /detail/SPPUFL6H4JI23WDK/text

Daily charge
100.00 CZKSource: Statutární město Karlovy Vary, read 2026-09-15
Full citation

Statutární město Karlovy Vary — Obecně závazná vyhláška č. 7/2022, čl. 5 odst. 1: "Sazba poplatku činí za jedno vozidlo 100,- Kč za každý započatý den". Charged per started day and per number plate. Čl. 5 odst. 2 offers flat rates instead, again per plate: 2 000 Kč for 30 days, 4 000 Kč for 90 days, 14 000 Kč for 365 days. The charge falls due when the permit is issued, except that a flat rate above 21 000 Kč may be paid within 15 days of the permit taking effect (čl. 6). This source is the register's .docx of the act, and since D-192 the monitor unzips it and reads the wording: the strings watched here are quoted from the act itself, and the register's result page for the same act is watched separately

When it operates

The ordinance states no hours. It prices a permit by the day, the month, the quarter and the year and never mentions a time of day, and it is explicit that the entry ban is not its own doing: čl. 2 charges for a permit into an area "do které je jinak vjezd zakázán příslušnou dopravní značkou" — where entry is otherwise prohibited by the appropriate traffic sign.

Any window belongs to that sign, and we have not read it from an official source. The same article warns that a permit does not relieve the driver of any other duty under other legislation.

Area covered

The inner spa district, defined street by street in čl. 2 as: Krále Jiřího (part), Křižíkova, Petra Velikého, Sadová, Zahradní, Zámecký vrch, Pod Jelením skokem, Luční vrch, Tržiště, Lázeňská, Stará louka, Mariánská, Mariánskolázeňská (part), Nová louka, Divadelní náměstí, náměstí Svobody, Vřídelní, Karla IV., I. P.

Pavlova (part), Ondřejská, Na Vyhlídce (part), Moravská, Kolmá, Petřín, Raisova, Hynaisova, Divadelní, Husovo náměstí, Libušina (part), Tylova, Škroupova, Nebozízek and Vyšehradská. The ordinance calls this the "lázeňské území" and uses that term throughout.

Four of the streets are included only in part, and the ordinance does not say which part, so the exact ends of those four are on the signs rather than in the text.

Source: Statutární město Karlovy Vary, read 2026-09-15
Full citation

Statutární město Karlovy Vary — Obecně závazná vyhláška č. 7/2022, čl. 2. This source is the register's .docx of the act, and since D-192 the monitor unzips it and reads the wording, so the strings watched here are the act's own

We have not checked for a map yet
The city defines the zone as a list of thirty-three streets and squares, four of them only in part, and does not publish a perimeter with the ordinance. Turning that list into a polygon would be our drawing rather than the city's boundary, and the four partial streets are exactly where such a drawing would go wrong. Whether Karlovy Vary publishes the spa district as a map or a dataset of its own has not been looked at, and we will not record it as unpublished before looking. The warning is city-wide meanwhile: the municipality's furthest corner is 9.33 km from the city anchor, and the zone is a small part of that.
Petrol standard

There is no emission test. The ordinance asks nothing of a petrol engine: entry turns on holding a permit. The one place the powertrain matters is the opposite of a standard — a battery-electric vehicle is released from the permit altogether under čl. 4 odst. 6, which is an exemption rather than a threshold, and no petrol or hybrid vehicle qualifies for it however new.

Diesel standard

There is no emission test, for diesel or for anything else, and there is no Czech scheme that sets one. On 15 September 2026 the Ministry of the Interior's national register of municipal legislation held zero acts, in the whole country and over its whole history, whose title contains "emisn" — the stem of nízkoemisní zóna — against 107 for "vjezd" and 4 029 for the control phrase "o nočním klidu".

That zero was never evidence on its own, and cycle 67 read the statute to find out why. § 14 odst. 1 of the Air Protection Act (201/2012 Sb.), read from the ministry's official ELI endpoint in the version in force on 15 September 2026, creates a nízkoemisní zóna by "opatřením obecné povahy vydaným v přenesené působnosti" — a measure of general nature issued in delegated state administration, decided by the rada obce.

This register holds obecně závazné vyhlášky and nařízení, and an opatření obecné povahy is neither, so a Czech low emission zone could not appear here whatever municipalities had done.

What the register does rule out is the money: § 14a lets a municipality set a nízkoemisní poplatek by obecně závazná vyhláška, which would be filed here, and the register's controlled vocabulary of 137 statutory empowerments cites 201/2012 Sb. exactly three times — § 10 odst. 4 (10 acts filed under it), § 16 odst.

5 (241) and § 17 odst. 5 (19) — and never § 14 or § 14a. So no Czech municipality has introduced a low-emission charge.

Cycle 68 read that other collection, and it settles the rest. § 14 odst. 6 requires a municipality that establishes a zone to send the measure to the Ministry of the Environment within one month of announcing it, and the state service catalogue registers the ministry’s duty to publish the resulting list as agenda A1126, in force since 29 May 2021.

That list is a page on the ministry’s own site, and on 15 September 2026 it read "V ČR zatím nebyla v žádné obci zavedena nízkoemisní zóna" — no municipality in the Czech Republic has yet established a low emission zone — and added that the national system for checking a vehicle against a zone has not been switched on, because there is no zone to check it against.

This is no longer an inference from a register that could not have held the instrument: it is the receiving ministry’s own statement, on the page its own service catalogue names as the statutory list. The one restriction the ministry does name is in Prague, where parts of the city bar vehicles over 3.5 tonnes that do not meet Euro 6, and it says in the same sentence that this is not a nízkoemisní zóna within § 14.

We do not publish that Prague restriction here, and cycle 69 measured why rather than assuming it. The ministry points at the city’s own service catalogue for the detail, and praha.eu serves those entries from /api/, a path its robots.txt forbids. The two channels that are not forbidden were then asked, and both answer nothing.

The city’s own register of vyhlášky a nařízení holds 1,049 acts and returns zero for vjezd, nákladní, emisní, nízkoemisní, tranzit and Euro, against controls of 12 for ovzduší, 13 for vozidel, 12 for omezení, 8 for stání and 5 for zákaz on the same instrument; the only two acts it returns for emis are air-quality programmes for 2006 and 2010-2012.

The city’s open data catalogue at opendata.praha.eu holds 408 datasets and returns zero for vjezd, nákladní, emisní, značení, tranzit and Euro, against controls of 23 for doprava and 2 for zóna. Prague’s own sitemaps enumerate 67,796 URLs and none of them is a rule page for it either.

That is consistent with what the ministry says the instrument is: not an ordinance and not a § 14 zone, but a road authority’s act carried on a traffic sign.

Penalty if you do not comply

No official source we hold states a fine for driving in. What čl. 8 provides for is not a penalty for entry but a penalty for non-payment: a charge that is late or short is assessed by the administrator and may be increased by up to three times, and that increase follows the charge as its appurtenance.

Driving past the sign without a permit is an offence against the traffic sign under the road traffic act, whose scale the ordinance does not cite and which we have not read from an official register. Not estimated.

How to comply
  • The spa district is closed to motor vehicles by traffic sign. Unless an exemption below covers you, you need a permit before you drive in.
  • Permits are issued by the Magistrát města Karlovy Vary, finance department, at Moskevská 2035/21. A single permit for one to seven consecutive days can also be bought after payment from machines or a mobile application set up for the purpose, and there the plate printed on the permit counts as the declaration.
  • The rate is 100 Kč per vehicle for each started day, or a flat 2 000 Kč for 30 days, 4 000 Kč for 90 days or 14 000 Kč for 365 days — each tied to one number plate. You choose the flat rate when you register, not later.
  • A battery-electric vehicle needs no permit at all. Neither do vehicles with right of way and those they escort, city public-transport buses and visibly marked service and standby vehicles, vehicles immediately clearing damage from a natural disaster or a building collapse, people with diplomatic privileges, or a doctor's vehicle carrying the prescribed marking on a home visit.
  • A spa guest staying in accommodation inside the zone needs no permit on the day of arrival and the day of departure. On any other day of the stay, they do.
  • You pay nothing if you are registered as living in the zone or own property there, or are a close relative, spouse or child of someone who is; if you use property inside the zone for business or public-benefit activity, though your employees are not covered; or if you hold a ZTP or ZTP/P card, and a companion is covered too.
  • Service vehicles of the city and its companies, the region, the district court, the district public prosecutor, the tax office, the agricultural and food inspectorate and the regional public health authority are exempt, as are volunteer fire brigades and the security forces, the army, field social services, and organisers of a major cultural, social or sporting event the city has given its patronage to.
  • Declare what you are claiming when you apply. If you do not report a fact that an exemption rests on within 15 days of it changing, the ordinance says the entitlement lapses.
  • Pay on time and in full: an underpaid or late charge can be assessed and increased by up to three times.
Source: Statutární město Karlovy Vary, read 2026-09-15
Full citation

Statutární město Karlovy Vary — Obecně závazná vyhláška č. 7/2022, čl. 3 to čl. 8. This source is the register's .docx of the act, and since D-192 the monitor unzips it and reads the wording, so the strings watched here are the act's own

Sources

Next scheduled re-check: 2027-03-15.

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