Wheels of change: How Paris aims to drive polluting SUVs from capital

Mayor since 2014, Ms Hidalgo has been greening Paris, increasingly gearing it away from private cars and towards public transport, pedestrians, and cyclists, building more than 400km of bike lanes and pedestrianising many roads.

“The balance of power has changed,” said Jane MacAvock, an art historian who is originally from Ireland but who lives in Paris.

Cars are no longer the priority. Like in the West of Ireland, when cows are on the road, traffic has to stop. Now in Paris, cars have to give way to bikes and pedestrians.

“Anne Hidalgo has been very brave. We need to have less cars. She has redesigned the Parisian landscape for less cars. It has reduced pollution.”

Tomorrow’s referendum will ask people whether “the heaviest, bulkiest, and most polluting SUVs in the capital” should face triple the parking charge, rising from €6 to €18 an hour in the 1st to 11th arrondissements of the city centre and from €4 to €12 an hour in the rest of the city — the 12th to 20th arrondissements.

The prices will apply to combustion engine or hybrid vehicles weighing more than 1.6 tonnes, allowing more leeway for electric vehicles (EVs) with only those weighing more than 2 tonnes qualifying for the increased charge. Parisians with residents’ parking will not be impacted under the proposed change.

Health professionals, crafts-people, taxi drivers at dedicated stations, and those who are ill or infirm and carry a parking mobility card would also be exempt. It is estimated that some €35m could be raised for the city through the increased charges.

As large SUVs are often owned by the wealthy, the increased fees were described as a form of income redistribution by David Belliard, a deputy mayor of Paris for the Green party.

“This is about very expensive cars, driven by people who today have not yet made the changes to their behaviour that have to be made,” Ms Hidalgo said.

The referendum is part of her larger vision to reclaim space in the city from polluting vehicles in favour of pedestrians, cyclists and the public realm. Water quality has been improved so much in Paris’ iconic River Seine that it will host open-water swimming events in the upcoming Olympic Games.

Since 2016, Paris has pioneered car-free Sundays once a month, when cars are banned from large parts of the city and the streets are taken over by picnickers, protesters, live music, street theatre, and families. Public transport and the city’s bike scheme are also free for the day.

The policy, called ‘Paris Respire’ or ‘Paris Breathes’ was a bid to tackle air pollution.

Such policies have generally made the city greener and more “user friendly”, Ms MacAvock said. Bikes and occasionally the Metro, are now the fastest ways to get around the city.

“I’ve never owned a car,” she said. “In Paris, maybe 50% of people don’t own a car. I have a lot of Parisian friends who don’t drive.

In most areas of Paris you can walk a few minutes to a supermarket, you can take a bike, take public transport. You don’t need a car to get kids to school — the school run usually means walking or cycling or maybe getting the bus or metro.

“Except for the older generations, or people making deliveries or carrying equipment to work, people don’t need cars. You don’t need a SUV in Paris, it’s a luxury, so why not pay?”

Reducing car reliance may also have a positive social impact, Ms MacAvock believes. “Public and active transport creates more space for human connection,” she said.

“After a concert, on the bus or the Metro, everyone is chitter-chattering about the concert.

“People are in more physical contact with people who are different to them. You listen to other people’s conversations on the bus or the Metro. You don’t get that interaction if you’re in a car.

“In the US, people are more isolated in their own bubbles. They get in their car and drive places alone.

“I find Paris friendlier than Dublin now. People talk to each other in Paris. There’s a connection with people that you have here.”

However, praise for Ms Hidalgo and her reforms is not unanimous, Ms MacAvock said.

Her remodelling of the famous city has had its critics, who say she has made it uglier and destroyed some of its famous 19th century architecture, including two fountains on the iconic Place de la Republique, making way for a large open space which skateboarders can use, and traffic calming measures to make it safer for pedestrians and less polluted.

“Some people are very angry about changing the 19th century nature of the city, but it is a living city, and it needs to be liveable for its inhabitants,” Ms MacAvock said. 

Cynics note that Ms Hidalgo’s first referendum on e-scooters came after she polled poorly in the 2022 presidential election, winning 1.75% of the vote as the Socialist Party candidate.

The SUV vote comes months after Ms Hidalgo was embroiled in a scandal over visiting her daughter in French Polynesia, following an official trip for the region to visit the Tahiti Olympics surfing venue. The trip was expensive and came days after a terror attack on a school in northern France in which a teacher was stabbed to death.

Although Ms MacAvock believes the Paris referendums — on rental e-scooters last year and SUV parking charges this year — are “gimmicks”, she said they may be useful to encourage democratic participation, at a crucial time when democracy has been faltering globally.

Following that vote last year on rental e-scooters, Paris became one of the first capitals to ban them.

Three people died in e-scooter incidents in 2022 and 459 were injured, according to French media reports.

Turnout for the vote was low at just 8% but an overwhelming majority of almost 90% voted for the ban.

Brian Caulfield, professor in transport at the Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering in Trinity College Dublin, predicts a higher turnout for tomorrow’s vote.

A strong vote for the proposal is again expected. Few Parisians own SUVs and for those who do, their parking permits will be unaffected.

Prof Caulfield welcomed the referendum as another positive initiative by Ms Hidalgo, a visionary from whom Ireland could learn.

“Paris realises there is not space for the number of vehicles in the city,” he said.

“They’re trying to get ready for the Olympic Games, and to promote a culture of sustainable transport. And SUVs, because of their size alone, research has shown that they’re not safe when it comes to interactions with pedestrians and cyclists. They take up more road space and they make vulnerable road users feel more vulnerable by the sheer size of vehicles.

“As a policy, I think it’s a great idea. I think people will have an opinion and they will come out and show that opinion.”

Raising parking charges for SUVs is something we should consider in cities such as Cork and Dublin, not just from a climate and pollution perspective but also due to the space these vehicles take up and from a road safety perspective, he said.

As SUV sales have risen, new cars have increased in size, getting 1cm wider every two years.

“Cars are getting bigger but our cities, our road spaces aren’t getting bigger,” Prof Caulfield said.

“In our cities we don’t have transport problems, we have space problems. How much space do we want to allocate to different things? That’s up for debate, whether or not we want to add more space for cars or people.”

Car-focused policy

Irish policy, up to this point, has been too car-focused, with not enough emphasis on people, but that is slowly changing, he said. “Cities are for people to live in. Not for cars.”

“Unjustified” is how the French motorist association 40 Millions D’Automobilistes described French municipalities’ “war” on SUVs.

It claims that the Paris proposal is a restriction on liberties and a clampdown on “the country’s most popular vehicle”.

Brian Cooke, director general of the Society of the Irish Motor Industry, said that policies abroad do concern the domestic industry.

Ultimately, however, if the motor industry is to have a future, it has to be part of the environmental solution, Mr Cooke said. The industry is trying to embrace a carbon-neutral future, he said. 

Ireland saw EV registrations rise by 12% in January to a record 4,109 new electric vehicles. But this was still a small fraction of the total 31,470 car registrations in January (a 15% increase from the previous year).

So far in 2024, petrol cars still sold the most at 31.83%, followed by hybrid (petrol electric) at 23.95%, diesel at 21.77%, electric at 13.06%, and plug-in electric hybrid at 6.96%.

“There are over 100,000 electric vehicles on the road in Ireland at the moment,” Mr Cooke said. “We need to drive transport emissions down and active travel, public transport, and electric vehicles all have a hugely important role to play. All three have to work.”

France has relatively low tax for cars, unlike Ireland, Mr Cooke said. But higher taxes had already been introduced there for heavier and more polluting vehicles.

“They’re focused on people with heavy, expensive cars that are high emitting,” he said.

In Ireland, large SUVs only account for 4% of the entire market and 7.5% of the SUV market, so a similar policy wouldn’t have a huge impact here.

SUV can be a misleading term as it encompasses a huge range of vehicles, including ‘family vehicle’ crossovers and many vehicles which would fall below the 1.6 tonne weight limit for which Paris is proposing increasing parking charges.

Large, heavy cars that are not SUVs could also weigh more than the 1.6 tonnes (or 2t for an EV) so could still be subject to the increased parking fees, he said.

“If you look at the history of taxation in French cities, the higher emitting the car, the greater the charge,” he said. “So the parking charge is the same principle. Ultimately what we’re all trying to deal with is emissions.”