This is the best summary I could come up with:
Green activists in Paris are making a final push to win a landmark vote tripling parking charges for SUVs in a move aimed at tackling air pollution that is being closely watched by other cities such as London.
In final campaigning before Sunday’s vote, the socialist mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo, canvassed parents outside a primary school in the 10th arrondissement near the Gare du Nord, where pollution from large boulevards, traffic on small backstreets and a lack of green space had led many residents to call for fewer cars.
An Opinionway poll for Le Parisien this month found that 61% of Paris residents backed raising parking charges for SUVs.
Lucie, 39, a caterer dropping her nine-year-old to school, said: “I get so angry seeing people sitting alone in their big SUVs in traffic in the morning; it just doesn’t make sense.
Diane, a stylist, who travels by electric bike with her two children aged seven and two, said: “I’m voting to send a message that we don’t want cars in general: for air quality, noise, for the climate and even for the overall mood of the city.
Before Paris, Lyon – France’s third biggest city, which is run by the Greens – devised a progressive parking tariff system to incentivise people away from the use of heavy sports vehicles.
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“It’s not an SUV unless it’s from the US, otherwise it’s just a large sparkling hatchback.”
Good. Why are MY tax dollars being used to subsidize everyone else’s parking?
I’ve started to ask myself this more and more. Why is on street free parking (or even metered, but in a crowded core area) a value choice we make in our cities?
I’m still chewing on the concept, but once I considered challenging that status quo, it opened a lot of new approaches to what is considered a right vs exploiting the common city resources for individual use.
This is in Paris you numpty
Maybe they thought it was Paris, Texas?
I’d go further. Why would anyone’s tax dollars be used to subsidise anything?
So that healthcare and education, among other things, are more equitable. Taxes are for subsidising a public good.
Parking spaces are public good…
What about tripling the penalty for driving over a toddler?
https://road.cc/content/news/suvs-8-times-more-dangerous-kids-walking-or-cycling-295527
Everywhere we should start changing parking charges to “by the foot”. The longer your car is the more you need to pay. That will incentivize smaller, safer cars for people that don’t really have any need for something big.
While still punishing larger families that absolutely need the space. I’m not against the concept generally speaking but we need to consider those kinds of ramifications. Low income families can be large too, afterall. Not even talking about with kids - many families have the grandparents/cousins/etc. around as well.
people had larger families in the era where cars were smaller. no one needs an SUV in a city, they’re meant for hauling firewood to the remote cabin where there’s no paved roads
That’s not what a Sport Utility Vehicle is for. An SUV’s purpose is just to show off
Human overpopulation is the biggest cause of anthropogenic climate change, and the root cause of almost all existential and major ethical problems facing us.
Becoming a biological parent while our fertility rate is catastrophically and unsustainably high, causes by far more CO2e pollution than anything else.
We shouldn’t just tax these omnicidal people, we should vote in parties that’ll make laws to jail or hang people making the world unlivable.
the birthrates are falling arguably too fast now, one estimate says we’re no longer on track for 10 billion people by 2100, down to 9.1b now
We’re already massively overpopulated: https://overshoot.footprintnetwork.org/
Human overpopulation is the root cause and biggest cause of catastrophic climate change:
Fuck off denialist
Ok just so I’m not misunderstanding you, are you saying we should jail people who have kids? I feel like I’m not following the thread of your point here and I think it is very unlikely that is what you’re saying. But it’s kind of coming across that way in your comment.
Yes. We need a fertility rate of about 0.01 for several decades, because human overpopulation is the root cause and biggest cause of catastrophic climate change:
- https://phys.org/news/2023-04-population-growth-main-driver-carbon.html
- https://interactive.guim.co.uk/uploader/embed/2017/07/co2_saved/giv-3902H9Q7lx2HE5M7/
If we choose not to vote in parties to make such laws, we’ll be culpable in letting the anthropocene extinction event become a mass-extinction event - wiping out more than 50% of genera and more than 70% of species. If you think too few honey bees are bad, imagine how catastrophic it would be for most living species to go extinct, including almost all the small life forms in the oceans which provide the majority of the biosphere’s oxygen.
Yes, I understand, but a flat fee regardless of size of car as it now, is effectively a subsidy directly toward the development of car dependent cities. Also families don’t tend to travel downtown by car on weekdays where space is a premium, those are usually single drivers going to work and often in NA, those lone drivers are often in large pickups and SUVs.
Large families taking the train have to pay roughly proportionally to the size, which is one of many reasons why many families opt for car culture. It’s not those fault the options are this way but my point is that it can be changed.
I agree that in this particular case it makes sense. But the person that responded to said that everywhere should adopt this rule.
(I was that person 😉). I suppose everywhere was a bit broad of wording. Where space isn’t a premium, parking is often free anyway so I wasn’t really including that. Like a Costco or Walmart wouldn’t have any good reason to have someone just to go around measuring people’s cars.
Well that’s what I get for not checking usernames lol anyway glad to see it’s not as strict as it sounded.
Honestly, get a car and then add a roof rack instead of an SUV You have the space you need, it’s cheaper than an SUV, it’s more fuel efficient, and you can take it off and not have to transport all the extra weight when it is not necessary
Here in Italy the FIAT 500 was the first “family car” and was less than 3 meters long, the FIAT 500 Giardiniera was the station wagon version and it was 3.1 meters long. If you look at an old 500 now, you’d wonder how would a human fit inside.
Today’s average SUV is over 4 meters long, with some going over 5 meters. In Japan there are Kei cars used as trucks, people movers, vans etc. The fact that you need a Jeep compass to be able to pick up your kid from school is absurd
Cars are not the only way to move people around. They are, however, the worst way to move people around. Take a bus and/or train, and you’ll never have to worry about parking again.
In response, more and more of our streets can be reclaimed for pedestrians spaces, adding walking/biking paths, adding greenery, adding outdoor patios, etc, instead of it all just going to ever increasingly large and crowded parking spaces and One More Lane™
As an avid fan of Cities Skylines, buses are not the answer. Give me a decent metro system.
The other issues is that I don’t mind people taking away lanes as long as they present other alternatives. Currently, my area is taking away a lane WITHOUT giving me an alternative.
I never said cars are the only way to move around. I’m just saying we need to think through this a little bit. I agree with the idea for the most part.
The only place on the world where low income families have big trucks is the US because of debt and extremely car dependent infrastructure. French poor families use public transit.
Large families don’t use big trucks. They use SUVs/minivans.
The latest trucks out are being marketed towards family movers now. Basically up to four kids (which is now a large US family) they try to push pickups as a family car.
Dude, come the fuck on. Are we really going to debate this?
People raised families through the 90s without the space of an SUV. You will survive.
Station wagons and minivans were hardly compact lol
But yes many modern vehicles are ridiculous.
Nah, square footage instead of length.
Problem is it’s much easier to have someone just take a measuring tape to a car when ticketing and get the length. You can get the footprint, sure, but you have to ensure you measure from the same point twice, and that you’re pretty much perfectly perpendicular. You could also have a database of makes and models but then you have to have somebody set up and maintain the database and that causes all sorts of headaches
That’s how we got camelback houses with more floors in the back than in the front. Measuring just length will make the cars fat.
Cubic feet would be better, especially as taller vehicles are more dangerous to pedestrians.
Length × Width × Hood Height then?
Yeah, and just register it in a database. Like how I gotta pay $100 more in vehicle registration because my car’s 50 fucking kg above the lower bracket. People with F350s can pay triple what I do. No, sextuple! Because they can’t fit in just one park. Parking inspector puts in the number plate and machine calculates the rest.
That’s how we get double decker cars lol
Ah yeah, that’s more accurate to what I was thinking
Let’s ban archaic units like feet and stick with cubic meter.
Plus there are vans, so the more accurate metric would be a cubic meter per passenger.
I need the length in my car right now. I’d rather charge by weight. I like sedans (currently in a wagon). What I’d like to get rid of is big trucks for no reason
Rip EVs then
As much as I like cars, cars aren’t the answer. Public transport is.
But the cost of constructing parking infrastructure is more directly related to square meters than weight (in HCOL areas especially). Sure more weight means beefier structures and/or pavement are needed, but that tends to average over an area vs a large object requiring a larger investment regardless of whether it’s light or not.
Until everyone buys a hummer EV….
