Melbourne Council ute parking war: Drivers in large vehicles set to be slapped with higher parking fees, while owners are told: ‘You need to be dealt with’

Drivers of large cars and SUVs could soon start paying higher parking fees as councils look to pursue a controversial policy introduced in Europe.

Paris residents voted last month to triple parking costs for SUVs compared to standard-sized cars, from €6 ($9.90) per hour in the CBD to €18 ($29.70).

Now Melbourne’s Yarra City Council wants to follow suit, with one councilor saying Hummer owners are ‘absolute idiots’ who ‘need to be dealt with’.

On Tuesday evening, council unanimously backed a motion by Greens councilor Sophie Wade to explore ‘ways to make travel on Yarra’s streets fairer and discourage large and heavy vehicles from using Yarra’s streets, including by charging proportionate parking charges consider based on the size of a vehicle’.

But Paul Maric from carexpert.com.au told the story news.com.au that municipalities were ‘just trying to grab money’.

“They’re going for what I call woke-topia, this waking utopia where no one drives anywhere, everyone is on their bikes or driving around in little electric vehicles,” he said.

“However, in reality, people are driving SUVs and crew cabs, they are the best-selling cars in the country, and they want to increase the cost of them just to achieve a certain goal.”

Ms Wade told Yarra Council: ‘It’s really a matter of one person’s right to drive what they want, trumping everyone else’s right to (safety) on the streets, and I don’t think this is a compromise is that we have to be prepared to close.”

The council, which covers Melbourne’s eastern and northern suburbs such as Carlton North, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond, is believed to be the first council in Australia to crack down on vehicles dubbed by some as ‘Yank tanks’.

Left-wing councilor Stephen Jolly told the meeting that ‘if you live in Fitzroy, Collingwood or Richmond and buy a Hummer you are an absolute idiot and something should be done to you’.

He also offered some words of caution, saying Yarra had many ‘urban consolidation’ projects and such construction sites brought with them traditions.

“Almost everyone who owns or rents a home has had a tradie at least once,” he said, adding that many public housing residents in the council area worked in Melbourne’s suburbs and may own large vehicles.

“We must ensure that our most vulnerable, underserved residents are not disadvantaged by any action we take here,” Jolly said.

“I think that’s very possible, but we have to approach it from both a social justice perspective and an environmental perspective.”

Ms Wade’s motion prompted the council to note “the dangers associated with the increasing size and weight of vehicles on Australian streets, including vehicles such as the RAM and Defender.”

Those dangers include that ‘car crashes are now the leading cause of death for Australian children’, that children are ‘eight times more likely to die if hit by an SUV compared to a normal passenger car’ and that ‘it number of pedestrian deaths has remained stable while tolls have gone down.

The motion also noted that “larger cars are more polluting and have a greater impact on the climate… if SUVs were a country, they would be the sixth most polluting in the world.”

In NSW, NSW Greens transport spokeswoman Cate Faehrmann said “the size of SUVs is getting ridiculous” and supported measures to discourage their use if they are not actually needed for work.

“Large SUVs take up a lot more space on the road, even when parked, so if higher parking fees make some drivers take the train or cycle instead, then turn it on,” she told the police. Sydney Morning Herald.

Philipa Veitch, the Greens mayor of the eastern Sydney suburb of Randwick, said she is in favor of discouraging the kind of huge SUVs that “clog our roads and pose a threat to pedestrians and cyclists”.