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Paris votes to hike SUV parking charges

Fees to park larger vehicles on French capital's streets will treble following referendum
By Adam Hill February 5, 2024 Read time: 2 mins
If you want to park your SUV here, it's going to cost you (© Bellablanchard | Dreamstime.com)

If you want to park your SUV in Paris, it will soon burn quite a sizeable hole in your pocket.

A vote in the French capital yesterday means that parking fees for such vehicles will triple to €18 per hour in the city centre.

That is only for the first two hours - after that, the cost will rise, so that Sky News reports a six-hour stay with an SUV will cost €225, compared to €75 for smaller vehicles.

Last year, in a similar referendum, Parisians voted to ban free-floating e-scooters from the streets - on a low turn out.

Participation in yesterday's vote was also low, reports France 24 - only 78,000 (5.7%) out of 1.3 million eligible voters - but Parisians voted 54.55% in favour of boosting charges on cars which weigh 1.6 tonnes or above.

City mayor Anne Hidalgo has cut car use in the city by expanding the bike lane network and removing tens of thousands of parking spaces.

Despite the popularity of SUVs, they take up more space on the road than smaller cars and have been found to cause greater injuries to pedestrians. 

A study of nearly 18,000 pedestrian crashes by the US Insurance Institute for Highway Safety found that pick-ups, SUVs and vans with a bonnet height greater than 40 inches are "about 45% more likely to cause fatalities in pedestrian crashes than cars and other vehicles with a hood height of 30 inches or less and a sloping profile".

Not all SUVs will fall foul of the new parking charges in Paris: electric cars will need to be over 2 tonnes to fall under the new edict, and there are various exemptions such as for taxi drivers, health workers and people with disabilities.

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