The Guardian reports:
Councillors voted on Thursday to approve a new parking plan for the city whereby owners of larger vehicles will be charged more for parking permits because their cars "take up more parking space and are a danger to other road users".
The plan states that vehicles that weigh more than 2,400kg fully laden will be subject to a surcharge "to encourage drivers to switch to smaller vehicles"; this will later be reduced to 2,000kg for non-electric vehicles.
Dan De'Ath, the cabinet member for transport on the Labour-run authority, is quoted by the paper as saying that SUVs (sports utility vehicles) are:
"much larger than your average car, they produce far more wear and tear on our roads, but fundamentally if you hit a child while driving a heavy SUV the chances of that child dying are grossly inflated.
"We don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask people driving those kinds of vehicles to pay a little bit more for road wear and the extra space they take up. We’re not talking about SUV-shaped cars, we’re talking about very heavy American-style vehicles."
No doubt there will be protests, and those protests will be widely reported. But Sadiq Khan's ULEZ (ultra-low emission zones) schene in London, and his refusal to bow to a noisy minority, provides a good model for Cardiff Council to copy.
Two years ago the Conservative Party was convinced that opposition to ULEZ was going to win them the coming general election, Today they never mention them.
Photo by Ryunosuke Kikuno on Unsplash
There is also the amount of material that is consumed in their making and the environmental effect on the climate
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