Paris votes to triple SUV parking fees – and this includes electric ones
Parisians have voted to triple the parking costs for SUVs – including heavier electric ones and hybrids. This Sunday, the city held a referendum, with Parisians voting 56.6% in favor of increased parking fees.
While the narrow, traffic-clogged streets of Paris seem a better fit for the likes of the nimble Twingo, city officials say that the number of SUVs in the city has increased by 60% over the last four years. SUVs account for 15% of the 1.15 million private vehicles parked on Paris streets every night.
Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo sees the move to curb SUVs in the city as “a form of social justice,” with road safety and air pollution the main targets of the vote. She said that the vote had one particular driver in mind: rich drivers of the heaviest, most expensive, and polluting cars on the street who, essentially, need to wake up and see how their choices affect the rest of the city – with the caveat that only out-of-towners will be affected by the price hike. Still, officials say that some 10% of the vehicles parked in Paris will see increased parking fees, which could bring in up to €35 million, reports Le Monde.
“Parisians have made a clear choice… other cities will follow,” Hidalgo added. Lyon, France’s third largest city and run by the Green Party, has devised its own progressive parking fee system designed to target SUVs, with Grenoble looking on. London Mayor Sadiq Khan has said that he too is paying attention to the Paris vote, The Guardian reports.
The new fees could come into force at the beginning of September, with on-street parking for an SUV raised to €18 (about $19) an hour in the center of Paris and €12 (about $13) in the rest of the city.
The price hikes applies to ICE or hybrid SUVs weighing more than 1.6 tonnes (about 3,500 pounds), and electric SUVs weighing more than 2 tonnes, or 4,000 pounds. Paris residents will not have to pay extra. People working in Paris, taxi drivers, tradespeople, health workers, and people with disabilities will all be exempt.
Last year, Paris held a similar referendum that voted to ban electric scooter rental services, the first and only European capital to do so. Of course, the turnout for the vote was only 103,000 people, or 7% of registered voters. The SUV referendum, which was held Sunday, February 4, garnered even fewer votes, with 78,121 people, or 5.7% of registered voters, Le Monde reports. Still, while not many people ventured out on to cast their vote, Le Parisien ran an Opionway poll this month that found 61% of city residents backed the plan to hike frees for SUVs.
The socialist mayor has put front and center a reduction in car usage while simultaneously boosting eco-friendly transport in the city. SUVs – which are taller, heavier, and deadlier and use more energy and resources than a typical sedan – account for almost half of all new passenger cars sold in Europe last year, according to the European Automobile Manufacturers Association. A pedestrian is twice as likely to die in a collision with an SUV than a standard vehicle, Hidalgo stated.
She has made big moves in expanding bike lanes by reducing parking spaces. In the past few years since the coronavirus lockdowns, there has been a 71% rise in the use of bikes in the city. Of course, I wished I’d see more helmets on heads here – because even with more bike lanes, Paris traffic is intense, with bikes lane sometimes merging in and out of traffic lanes.
Regardless, Hidalgo is hoping automakers will get the message, that there is no place for huge, bulky, polluting SUVs in a city like Paris. “With this vote, we want to say stop,” she has said. “Stop the excesses of carmakers, who are pushing people to buy ever bigger, more expensive, more raw-material-intensive, more polluting vehicles.”
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China just connected its largest single-capacity solar farm built on a former coal mining area, which is in the Gobi Desert, to the grid.
The Mengxi Blue Ocean Photovoltaic Power Station, located in Otog Front Banner, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, came online on November 5. With a massive installed capacity of 3 gigawatts (GW) and over 5.9 million solar panels, the plant will generate around 5.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually – enough to power 2 million households.
This huge project will save about 1.71 million tons of standard coal each year and cut carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 4.7 million tons, which is equivalent to planting 62,700 hectares (around 155,000 acres) of trees.
Built on coal mining subsidence land, Mengxi Blue Ocean is part of China’s national West-East Electricity Transfer Project, which brings investment and development to western China west while supplying the growing need for electricity in the eastern provinces.
The solar farm includes the country’s first large-scale outdoor solar testing base in the Gobi Desert climate, demonstrating the potential for large solar installations in challenging environments.
The power station makes use of new rare earth alloy grounding materials, cutting costs by 40%. It also replaces traditional concrete foundations with steel to minimize impact on the local grassland ecosystem.
Chuang Xihong, deputy director of the Engineering Construction Department of Guodian Power Group, CHN Energy’s parent company, explained that Mengxi Blue Ocean is an agrivoltaic project as well [via PV Tech]:
Fine forage and sand-fixing plants are planted under the PV modules, providing grazing for Australian White Sheep and chickens. A composite ecological development model will be established where PV power generation and breeding will go hand in hand.
Read more: China powers up the world’s largest open-sea offshore solar farm
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