Paris votes to crack down on SUVs | Non-Parisians will be charged almost $20 per hour to park large gas or hybrid vehicles within the city center in a bid to address pedestrian safety and air pollu…::Parisians have voted to increase parking charges for out-of-town SUV drivers as part of the city’s efforts to address road safety, air pollution, and climate change.
Twice as likely to kill a pedestrian…if that number holds up this needs to happen in more cities. Driving an excessively deadly vehicle through crowded areas shouldn’t be free.
I fucking hate SUV’s, and I drive one (company car, had no say in the matter). Tax them all to hell and back.
I don’t think some millionaire earned a 2x chance to kill a pedestrian by being able to pay. I’m not a fan of fees that only apply rules to poor people.
But outright bans are harder to get passed, so fees are better than nothing.
Funny thing about markets though, when you put fees on SUVs that just means the prices on used SUVs will go down, and so you’ll have fees being leveed on only the poorest who have no choice but to buy the cheapest car they can find and the richest who don’t care about the fee.
They can still buy used regular cars. Anyway, in Paris and its suburbs, poor people can’t afford a car in the first place.
That’s a very ivory-Tower retort - ‘they can still buy regular cars’.
If you can barely put food on the table and NEED a car (eg for work), and nearly nothing in your bank account, do you spend $3000 on a sedan or $1000 on an equally good SUV?
Second hand market prices in general are extremely demand driven, and with vehicles in particular there are so many other costs to vehicle ownership that a change in price won’t shift overall demand much. This just changes the balance pushing SUVs to the bottom of the market. Nobody buying a Porsche SUV in Paris cares about your silly tax.
Can you give an example of a job you would need a car for in Paris?
Tradespeople, they generally own their own tools and bring several boxes to even a basic job, plenty of jobs where you don’t need a dedicated truck.
My time in Paris was before we had kids, so I don’t know about the logistics there, but in NYC where I did not even think about owning a car for years it’s Very difficult without a car, and there are no more than a few neighborhoods with everything is actually available locally.
Also anyone just starting their business who doesn’t have a purpose built vehicle yet - breaking into catering, flower shop, etc.
It’s not free, at least not in Portugal. You pay an yearly tax per vehicle, the value depends on the vehicle model.
I’d love to see how they calculated those 20%. If it’s merely a statistic of which type of car was involved in what share of deadly accidents with pedestrians, it says nothing about the car but rather about the drivers.
Once a car reaches a certain speed, it really doesn’t matter if it’s an ultralight vehicle or a tank.
Less mass means less momentum, so less force is required to slow it down, which means it can slow down faster in the time between noticing the pedestrian and colliding.
Higher hood means less visibility directly in front of the vehicle. It also means it’s more likely to hit the centre of mass so the body takes the full force and falls on the ground the vehicle is moving towards, rather than lower so that the legs get pushed out and the body ends up falling on the hood.
On the flip side, they are more visible and generally louder, so pedestrians might be making fewer mistakes on their end.
The differences aren’t about when they hit someone at a high enough speed any vehicle will likely kill them, it’s about the thresholds between a harmless bump and a fatal injury.
And even if the driver is the main factor, that’s all the more reason to increase the burden involved in driving them.
Indeed, but the cost of acceleration up to that speed is heavily influenced by mass.
And I don’t know many cities where you can cruise endlessly without traffic, stops, red lights, etc. Especially Paris where you would be lucky to attain 50km/h.
It’s time for Pedestrian crash avoidance mitigation (PCAM) to be enforced as standard feature. Much better solution. Large vehicles will still need to exist, even though I agree fewer of them should.