North Macedonia: 1 scheme to know about before you drive in.
Skopje has one driving restriction on our books: the Пешачки површини и зони забранети за сообраќај на подрачјето на град… (limited traffic zone). What is a limited traffic zone?
Sources last read on 2026-09-16, from the authorities' own pages. The next scheduled check is 2027-03-19.
Skopje's restriction is a flat ban on a named handful of central streets, and the only vehicle it lets in is one delivering goods. The instrument is the Одлука за организирање и дефинирање на условите за доставување на стока на подрачјето на град Скопје, made by the Council of the City of Skopje on 18 February 2016 under article 7(2) indent 8 of the national Law on Road Traffic Safety, and amended twice since.
Its article 2 divides the city's public surfaces into four zones, and only one of them is a driving rule at all. Three of the four — the narrow city area bounded by a named ring of boulevards, the wider city area outside it, and the streets carrying public transport — regulate stopping and parking, which is a parking rule rather than an entry rule and is not what this record is about.
The fourth, article 4(3), is: 'пешачки површини' are surfaces on which motor-vehicle traffic is forbidden, except for vehicles moving, stopping and parking in order to deliver goods, and the decision names them one by one. For a driver of an ordinary car the whole scheme reduces to one sentence: on those surfaces you may not drive, at any hour, on any day, and there is nothing you can buy that changes it.
There is no charge, no day ticket, no resident tier and no exemption for a visitor. A goods vehicle is the only exception the decision contemplates, and even that is conditional.
It needs a written odobrenie from the City, issued for at most one year, applied for at the City archive with the vehicle's registration document and a contract with the business receiving the goods, and the application has to name which pedestrian zone it is for.
The City's own counter states what the permit is for in its own words — a controlled traffic regime with recording of the movement of vehicles travelling in zones forbidden to traffic, worked with a system of electronic cards — which is how we know the regime is running rather than dormant.
Once in, a permitted delivery vehicle may stand no longer than 15 minutes, must leave the goods off the pavement, and may only use a pavement at all if 2.5 m is left clear for pedestrians and cyclists; on the pedestrian surfaces its window is 05:00 to 10:00. Two limits apply across every zone. The maximum permitted mass of a delivering vehicle is 12 tonnes.
And the decision never reads an engine: no Euro class, no fuel, no age, no emissions test appears in it or in either amendment, which is why both emission fields here are null rather than filled in.
That is not for want of an air-quality motive — the first amendment, in December 2017, shortened the narrow-area delivery window between 1 December and 31 March expressly 'заради намалување на загадувањето', to reduce pollution. It acted on the clock, not on the vehicle, and the second amendment made that winter window permanent in March 2018 and deleted the seasonal paragraph.