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Comment by tdrdt | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile the German city Tübingen is raising the parking fee for SUVs by 6 times and other cities are thinking about this as well. They are too big for those cities.

https://www.rtl.de/cms/tuebingen-parkgebuehren-fuer-suv-fahr...

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When you read the article:

-It's currently €30/y for a permit and due to a change in law they're changing that to €120 for everyone.

-For anyone over 1800KG, that becomes €180/y. So "heavy car" drivers pay 1.5x what a lightweight car driver pays

-That limit is increased to 2000kg for EVs. That does mean that a early adopters who drive a Model S are likely to pay the increase tariff as well.

Sure, still not a bad idea but quite far removed from the oneliner "raising the parking fee 6x for SUVS"

Ah, I now see another article that states it is 6x more than the country's average. So it seems it has to do more about this specific city than SUVs.

Tübingen is also, due to its topography, not really suited for too many cars in the city. Little space, river, hills, old and narrow streets. There's a lot of work being done to make it more friendly to cyclists and expanding public transport. Alas, the proposed tram was something too few people wanted.

I am confused on why some people don't get that SUV's are a preference because they do bring some benefits (namely more space, a bit higher guard (especially useful on shitty roads), and that the alternative aka MCV's / monovolume are just dead and were never a lot more drag efficient.

Does it suck to drive a SUV in a city ? Mostly yes, but is it better to tax people based on the car size ? Won't this just make some people have 2 cars now instead of 1 ?

I guess if they can afford an SUV, they can afford two cars.

But that is the point, two cars is much worse than one suv

Most SUV owning couples already have two cars.

Going into sterotypes mode now, guy drives regular car, wife drives SUV to take kids into school.

SUVs are more expensive on average than sedans or hatchbacks, but are not indicative of luxury clientele.

They surely are, people that count pennies to buy a class B car (rental category) aren't going to get any of those.

> I am confused on why some people don't get that SUV's are a preference because they do bring some benefits (namely more space, a bit higher guard (especially useful on shitty roads)

That's the reason why it's a tax or fee rather than a ban. If the benefits are worth it to you, fine, but you should pay for the social costs of your choices (which are not just high pollution but also taking up more road space and endangering other road users, especially cyclists and pedestrians).

> is it better to tax people based on the car size ? Won't this just make some people have 2 cars now instead of 1 ?

Seems pretty implausible. What would be the mechanism for that?

I don't know man SUVs might be more practical. But, I find them to look boring and for all old people. Sedans and hatchbacks definitely have a more fun look to them.

Which makes SUVs even more of a status signalling Veblen good - cost is correlated with status so cost increases can have perverse effects.

Let's see how it goes... the auto lobby is quite powerful in DE

Daimler (Mercedes) is quite close, and they complained loudly when Boris Palmer decided to drive a Prius rather than a Daimler car when he became mayor of Tübingen.

So yes, the auto lobby is quite powerful but the extent to which they can interfere with the business of a small liberal university town is very small.

Great. The rich can park while the poor cannot afford.

Who drives SUVs?

I will until my kids grow up, then might do small sedan. They are just too good with kids. Great for long trips too, but I rarely do those.

The poor already cant afford an SUV.

And in which World exactly do "the poor" drive SUVs?

Nissan and Renault both make appalling and cheap SUVs?

180€ pays how many monthly payments? Less than one?

Worse than that, poor people's bus or bike journeys end up being impeded by road hogging SUV's and other single occupancy vehicles.

Isn't it a illusion that poor people bike so much? I mean one of the most efficient indicators of real estate price is travel time to and from a city center.

Poor people can't afford cars. Cramming whole families into cheap apartments of questionable legality is not a great way to live, but you do what you have to.

This sounds highly location-dependent. I'm in rural America, and the poor here, with extremely rare exceptions, own cars. There are people living in dilapidated shacks with SUVs in the driveway.

Yes, that is very much an Americanism: house falling apart, shiny pretty car in front.

In Berlin at least there is a strong correlation between income and access to a car. Poor people take public transit and bike much more. They also tend to live close to major roads and suffer from noise and air pollution much more.

75% of the people with an income below 1500€/month don't have a car in Berlin. Only once you reach 3000€/month income (that's roughly the median income) the majority has access to a car.

That’s the point. It’s the point of so many things. If you can’t pay to offset the problem you impose on someone, you sometimes can’t impose on them.

That’s the idea.

What I meant is, do you really think the rich people will care? Will those people really not drive their SUV to the city?

They wont care, but their money can offset the harm done by their carelessness.

Maybe they will. If not you can increase the tax even more and, worse case scenario they still don't care and you still get the money to invest in public transportation :)

Under capitalism, any resource that has to be limited due to scarcity or the need to cut usage (in this case, parking space/car usage in cities) will be used by the rich. It's just how the system works.

Charge for parking? The rich can pay. Only allow cars with odd/even plates to enter depending on day of the week? The rich can have two cars, one even and one odd. Only allow electric cars? The rich can more easily buy one. Only allow to park at certain hours in the day? The rich can have more flexible timetables. Only allow to park for a limited time? The rich can have a chauffeur to drive their car away while they do their business. Don't allow to park at all? The rich don't even need to park, the chauffeur will drive their car away and that's it. Don't allow cars to enter at all? Rickshaws will get popular.

If you don't want to drop or radically reform capitalism, and you want to solve this kind of problems at all, it's just something you need to accept. It comes with the system that with money you have more means to adapt to any restriction.

It's true that charges like this are fairer when wealth is distributed more equally, so you make a powerful argument for wealth redistribution, but not against this policy.

Poor people have fewer cars, so they tend to benefit from less car-centric legislation. But anyway, even the new, higher costs are minuscule, at most 180€/year.

It says in the article that residential parking permits are only half the price for poorer people.

Unfortunate you are getting down voted. I've noticed HN is overrun by people with extreme left leaning views while they rake in tech salaries. SF is now literally a science experiment in petri dish - What happens when rich people, who pretend to care throw money at problems instead of actually getting involved?

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