Starting October 1, 2024, parking an SUV in Paris will cost €396/day

The City of Paris will implement, on October 1, 2024, a new exorbitant fee for vehicles over 1600 kg.

In Paris, street parking is paid from 9 AM to 8 PM, every day except Sunday. And forget the idea of free August parking, which disappeared a long time ago. The most indebted city in France, due to often criticized management, is looking for money everywhere. Increases in local taxes, automatic parking fines with radar cars that offer no respite, video surveillance for fines, street closures to traffic, etc., nothing is being done to make living in the Capital appealing.

On February 4, 2024, a very poorly attended public consultation led to an unprecedented decision: a tripling of parking fees for a certain type of vehicle. Specifically, thermal vehicles over 1600 kg and/or electric and hybrid vehicles over 2000 kg. The campaign, highly demagogic, targeted SUVs as a political party from the extreme abuses clichés to gain votes.

A problematic gentrification?

On October 1, 2024, parking a vehicle on the street will become unaffordable: 18 euros per hour? No, as the rate is not linear: for 3 hours, it will not cost you 54 euros, but 72 euros! 4 hours: 117 euros, etc. For 6 hours, the maximum for a ticket at once, you will have to pay 225 euros. To make it up for the 11 hours of a “legal” day, the price will rise to 396 euros!

Who can afford that? Is it not a denial of reality to believe that all SUV drivers, often parents without the luxury of multiple vehicles, do not face a political suicide at a time when Paris is emptying of its popular classes? This will also have consequences on the economic life of the city where shops and restaurants are dangerously closing. Walking around Paris reveals the problem between the ugliness of empty storefronts and the impact on unemployment.

The other mechanism will be the burying of vehicles underground, which will fill the pockets of parking companies, which will not solve the idea of Anne Hidalgo that SUVs will flee the capital.

Rather than demonizing SUVs, even electric ones that are designed to decarbonize the city, should not the socialist Mayor have, like Japan, rewarded smaller vehicles, the famous Kei Cars? Encouraging rather than punishing, would that not have been smarter? But then again, extreme ideas are currently all the rage across the French political landscape.

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