Oversized utes and SUVs have been sneaking around our towns and cities, stealing public space.
They can’t properly fit into standard parking spots, so they overfill, and their excess belly fat bulges across the line into another parking space, or into a bike lane, or other road space properly allocated to others.
And, taking a laughably perverse policy posture, the City of Port Phillip in Melbourne has offered more parking space to the metal beasts.
The council recently voted to increase the width of parking bays in Inkerman Street to accommodate broader vehicles.
Montreal in Canada is taking a different tack. In order to shed vehicle avoirdupois, which is making its streets narrower, a local municipality is charging big vehicles more for parking.
The city of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie calculates that as average vehicle sizes have gone from medium to enlarged, it has lost more than 4000 parking spots.
Now, residential parking permits are based on the weight of the vehicles, which closely correlates with size.
Residents with a petrol-engined car weighing more than 1850 kilograms pay C$205. If your car is lighter the fee is C$115.
Mayor Francois Limoges stated: “You cannot just do nothing about the fact that cars are now the size of Second World War tanks.”
In Montreal “light trucks” comprise 41% of all registered cars. Canada's car fleet is said to be the least fuel-efficient in the world.
In the city’s inner suburbs, few homes have car parking and car owners must park on the streets, yet space has also to be found for bus and bike routes as well as safety and placemaking upgrades.
It is yet to be seen whether the extra charge for parking permits has any effect on the number of bloated cars choking the streets.
Paris is trying harder: it has recently tripled the parking fee for large vehicles.
Some US states are now upping the registration fee more acutely for bigger vehicles.
Yet parking is where the power is. In Tokyo you can’t register any, big or small, car unless you have an off-street parking place for it.
Try that for size, City of Port Phillip.
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