Dublin City Council's proposal to double residents' annual parking permit costs has caused uproar with claims of begrudgery and bias, reports Caroline Madden
Gas-guzzlers, Ranelagh tractors, pretentious soccer mom-mobiles. Verbal SUV-bashing was whipped into a frenzy last week at the first hint that Dublin City Council might be cracking down on these oversized four-wheel drives.
A proposed €40 increase in the cost of certain residential parking permits - an issue that would normally have sparked nothing more than a few grumbles about Rip-Off Ireland - was blown into a matter of national debate as soon as it was linked to that emotive acronym, SUV.
The new bylaw proposed last week by the council would have seen owners of vehicles with a 2,000cc engine or above, pay a premium rate of €80 a year (double the current rate) for a permit to park on their street. It was widely assumed that this proposal was based on anti-pollution grounds and to discourage the use of SUVs in Dublin city.
However, when the proposed bylaws came before a meeting of the Council's Strategic Policy Committee last Thursday, it became clear that environmental concerns were not in fact at the heart of the matter, nor were SUVs being targeted exclusively.
Conor Faughnan of AA Roadwatch attended the meeting and questioned the city council on the logic behind the proposal: "They said that the principle reason for doing it was the space that over-large vehicles take up."
He agrees that limited space is a legitimate issue: "If you look at a residential disc-parking narrow street in the city centre area, if everybody on that street wants to drive a pick-up truck they're not all going to fit. Most of us accepted that as a reasonable rationale," he says.
However, Faughnan spotted a fundamental flaw in the council's plan - the physical space of a vehicle is not necessarily correlated with the engine size. "You can have a Mondeo or a Citroën C5-size car, which is your normal standard/executive saloon, and they will come in a range of engine sizes starting at 1.8-L, so on the same footprint you'll be charging different prices," he explains.
The council has now taken on board Faughnan's recommendation to base the charge on vehicle length rather than engine size. "I think some sort of discriminatory pricing in that regard is probably reasonable," he says. "I don't think it's reasonable to say we're both paying the same for a residential parking permit [ but] my vehicle is going to take up 17 feet of kerb space and yours is going to take up 10 feet."
According to Tim O'Sullivan, executive manager of the council's roads and traffic department, the redrafted proposal will come before a council committee next Monday. It will then be subject to a public consultation process, which should take roughly three months, before it comes into law.
The precise definition of what constitutes an oversized vehicle has yet to be decided, but car owners feeling smug that they don't have an SUV should watch out. Michael Nugent of BMW Ireland explains that saloon cars can often have larger "footprints" than small four-wheel drives. Similarly vans, people carriers and Hummers could all be caught, depending on the dimensions imposed.
Critics of the proposal have described it a populist move designed to appeal to the swelling ranks of SUV-haters, but O'Sullivan argues that there is a valid reason for its introduction. "There's a real premium on space and the fact of the matter is that the price being paid for the biggest vehicle is exactly the same as for the smallest Smart car."
Faughnan is critical of the gleeful "let's hammer the SUV owners, they deserve it" reaction that predominated the debate last week. "Whether or not you like SUVs is really beside the point," he says. "That sort of instinctive, unthinking, prejudice-based reaction is something that we found distasteful and it's just not a good way to plan a strategy."
O'Sullivan says that implementing the premium permit rate will serve as a wake-up call, "a way to make people think before they go off and buy these giant cars." But considering that the €80 charge would just about fill the tank of a €50,000 off-road vehicle, is it really going to affect people's purchasing decision?
The motoring industry certainly doesn't think so, but nevertheless is distinctly unimpressed. "It just seems petty, unworkable and I can't understand the rationale behind it," says Cyril McHugh, chief executive of SIMI, the industry lobby group. "Are they basically saying they're going to penalise houses with big families? How do you deal with the car that's parked badly and might take up more space than it needs to?"
He says that Dublin City Council has "done themselves no favours" in bringing out this proposal. "It just shows how badly thought out their whole traffic strategy is, when they've got a major city in Europe suffering from major congestion and all they can think about is residents' parking," he says. "It's an irrelevancy compared to the major lack of proper road infrastructure in Dublin."
Will it affect sales of large vehicles? "No," he says emphatically. "It just seems to be a money grabbing exercise."
"To me it smacks of something which I hoped had left Ireland - which is begrudgery," says Sam Synnott, managing director of Hyundai Ireland. "It's a gut reaction from someone who just has an issue with people driving bigger cars. There's neither rhyme nor reason to what they're doing," he says. "The only effect it will have is motorists having to fork out more money, but I don't think it's actually going to change their purchasing pattern."
He points out that several SUVs, such as the Hyundai Santa Fe, can also be classed as people carriers as they seat seven, and are often needed by people doing school runs or car-pooling. And according to Nugent of BMW, SUVs with turbo-diesel engines are likely to produce lower emissions than five- or six-year-old petrol saloon cars.
But whichever side of the SUV fence you sit on, the fact remains that parking is a hugely frustrating issue for city dwellers. John McSweeney, chairman of the Rathgar Residents' Association says that parking is a continuing problem. "We have people complaining to us about lack of space on an ongoing basis."
Part of the difficulty is caused by the shortage of off-street parking, with many houses unable to get permission to convert their front gardens into parking space. Mr McSweeney gives the example of Kenilworth Square, where offstreet parking is "the exception rather than the rule". Although he has detected a general antipathy towards SUVs from Rathgar residents, he hasn't received complaints about large vehicles in the context of parking.
He sums up the problem succinctly: "The trouble is that the car population is just too large for the available space." Can a €40 penalty really change this?"