Paris:
Twenty years after London started strikes to clamp down on sports activities utility automobiles, Parisians on Sunday will vote on whether or not to squeeze the gas-guzzlers out of city by tripling their parking charges.
The proposal by Paris’s Socialist mayor Anne Hidalgo is essentially the most radical by an enormous metropolis within the struggle towards the massive automobiles, blamed for driving up emissions, being a menace to pedestrians and usually taking over an excessive amount of house.
The variety of SUVs on the roads have shot up almost sevenfold since 2010, to about 330 million worldwide.
They devour round 20 % extra gas than a typical medium-sized automobile, the Worldwide Power Company mentioned in a 2023 report, and emitted almost one billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) in 2022, round twice Brazil’s whole emissions.
London leads the cost
The backlash towards SUVs and monster pickups dates again to the 2000s, when the suburban wealthy started migrating en masse from sedans to king-of-the-road behemoths beforehand used for tough terrain.
Dubbed “inventory change tractors” in Norway or “suburban assault automobiles” in Britain the car-trucks grew to become much-maligned standing symbols.
A key breakthrough within the bid to control emissions in massive cities got here in 2003 when London’s left-wing mayor Ken Livingstone launched a congestion cost for automobiles coming into town centre.
A yr later he took intention particularly at SUVs, criticising those that used them to drive youngsters to highschool as “full idiots” and saying the automobiles ought to be banned from the college run.
Guerrilla ways
Impressed by London, Paris first floated a clampdown on essentially the most polluting automobiles.
However the venture was shelved in 2005 after fierce opposition from motoring associations.
In 2007, authorities in Dublin picked up the difficulty and proposed to double parking expenses for SUVs. They have been additionally pressured to again down after public outcry.
Eco-vigilantes in international locations together with France and Sweden stepped into the fray with campaigns of mass SUV tyre deflations between 2005 and 2007.
Previously few years, they’ve grown extra radical, with a British group referred to as The Tyre Extinguishers drilling holes within the tyres of dozens of SUVs.
Punitive parking, registration charges
With the Earth’s warming reaching vital ranges and SUVs blamed for growing pedestrian deaths in the US, legislators are again on the anti-SUV warpath.
Final yr, Washington DC ramped up its registration charges for extra-large SUVs, requiring house owners of automobiles weighing over 6,000 kilos (round 2,700 kilogrammes) to pay $500 (460 euros) yearly, nearly seven occasions the price for a typical sedan.
New York can be mulling a rise in its weight-based registration charges.
In Germany, the crusading Inexperienced mayor of the southern metropolis of Tuebingen, which goals to grow to be local weather impartial by 2030, elevated parking charges for SUVs by 600 % in 2022, declaring them pointless for metropolis dwelling.
However one other Germany metropolis, Freiburg, needed to row again on an increase in parking charges for longer automobiles after it was thrown out by the Federal Administrative Courtroom.
In the meantime, London has been made into an “ultra-low emission zone”, with automobiles that don’t meet its emissions targets paying £12.50 ($16) a day to enter the capital.
Parking expenses in London and in different councils, together with Bathtub and North East Somerset, have additionally launched emissions-based parking charges.
(Apart from the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV employees and is printed from a syndicated feed.)
