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 trucks and SUVs could soon face higher parking charges as local councils seek to emulate a controversial policy introduced in Europe.

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

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

On Tuesday night, the council unanimously backed a motion by Greens Councilor Sophie Wade to investigate ‘ways to make travel on Yarra’s streets fairer and discourage large and heavy vehicles on Yarra’s streets, including by considering proportional parking charges based on a vehicle’s size’.

But Paul Maric of carexpert.com.au told news.com.au that the councils were ‘just trying to get money’.

“They’re going for what I call woke-topia, this awake utopia where nobody drives anywhere, everybody’s on bikes or driving around in little electric vehicles,” he said.

“In reality, though, people are driving SUVs and double cabs, they’re the best-selling cars in the country, and they want to increase the cost of them just to meet some goals.”

Ms Wade told Yarra Council that ‘It’s really a matter of one person’s right to drive whatever they want trumps everyone else’s right to (safety) on the street and I don’t think that’s a compromise we should be willing to enter into.’

The council, which covers Melbourne’s inner east and northern suburbs of Carlton North, Collingwood, Fitzroy and Richmond, would 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 or Collingwood or Richmond and you buy a Hummer, you are an absolute idiot and you need to be dealt with”.

He also offered some words of caution, saying Yarra had a lot of high-rise ‘urban consolidation’ projects and that such construction sites brought traditions of tar.

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

“We need to ensure that our most vulnerable, disadvantaged residents are not disadvantaged by any actions we take here,” Mr Jolly said.

‘I think it’s entirely possible to do, but we have to go into it with a social justice perspective as well as an environmental perspective.’

Ms Wade’s motion moved that the council take note of “the dangers posed by the increasing size and weight of vehicles on Australian roads, including vehicles such as the RAM and Defender”.

These dangers include that ‘car crashes are now the leading cause of death for Australian children’, children are ‘eight times more likely to die when hit by an SUV compared to a normal passenger car’ and that ‘pedestrian deaths have held steady, while the toll has gone down’.

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

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

“Large SUVs take up a lot more road space, even when parked, so if higher parking charges cause a few drivers to take the train or bike instead, take it,” she said. Sydney Morning Herald.

Philipa Veitch, the Greens mayor of the eastern Sydney suburb of Randwick, said she supported discouraging the type of huge SUVs that “clog up our roads and are a menace to pedestrians and cyclists”.