The price of parking for SUVs will indeed triple in Paris. “This pricing will be applied as of next September 1st,” announced Anne Hidalgo (PS), mayor of Paris, on her WhatsApp thread on Sunday evening. The residents of the capital no longer want to see SUVs on their streets, and they made it known during the vote organized on Sunday, February 4. 54.55% (42,415 people) of them have expressed their support for the increase in parking fees for “heavy, polluting, and obstructive” vehicles.
David Belliard (EELV), deputy mayor of Paris, confirmed this again on Monday, February 5 on BFMTV: “The result is clear, so we will do it,” said the councilor. “We will pass a deliberation to the Paris council in May, and I think that at the beginning of the school year, we will be able to implement it effectively.”
However, the very low participation level should be noted, as only 5.7% of registered voters, or 78,121 out of 1,374,532, went to the polls at one of the 222 polling stations deployed for the occasion.
A legitimate outcome, according to Ian Brossat (PCF), senator of Paris, who was invited to Public Sénat on Monday morning. “The result shows that there is a majority in Paris to consider the environment as a priority, reducing the presence of polluting cars. It follows positions that Parisians have always defended, such as the pedestrianization of the banks of the Seine, the development of cycle paths, etc.,” he considered before adding on his X account: “Some spend hours discussing surveys conducted on 500 people, so when 80,000 Parisians express themselves on a subject, the least we can do is to take it into account.”
“Principle of polluters payers”
“Despite quite strong divisions between the east and west, the choice of the Parisians is very clear in all the districts,” also reacted Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, during a press conference at the town hall on Sunday evening.
On the other hand, Sandrine Rousseau, deputy of the 9th district of Paris, also invited to Public Sénat this Monday, emphasized that the “principle of polluters-payers for very large cars that are very ostentatious objects” was welcome, specifying that family cars were not, for the most part, affected by this measure.
Present on the RMC morning show, Emmanuel Grégoire, first deputy mayor of Paris, denied an “incoherence” in the vote. “Parisians, like everyone else, when they are on rotational parking, will pay like everyone else. Simply, for residential parking, it seems fair to us to say that those who leave their vehicles at the bottom of their homes instead of using them should not be penalized.”
