Dublin parking may be based on length

The owners of SUVs (sport utility vehicles) and other big cars will charged for residential parking permits in Dublin on the basis of length of vehicle rather than engine size.

The Dublin City Council had proposed charging owners of vehicles with an engine size of 2,000cc double for residential parking permits.

However, the double charge will no longer be based on the size of the engine, but on the length of the vehicle.

The council's traffic and transport committee yesterday decided to amend proposed new bylaws after it was pointed out by the AA that many fuel-efficient cars would be penalised.

Committee chairman councillor Seán Kenny said the principle of charging the drivers of big cars more for residential parking was agreed unanimously by the committee and the council would still be targeting the drivers of SUVs and other gas-guzzlers. "We are after the same result, but using a different formula," he said.

AA public affairs manager Conor Faughnan told the meeting that models including the Saab 95, which runs on a petrol-ethanol mix, had engines bigger than two litres, as did many lean-burning diesel engine cars, but their carbon emissions were a fraction of that of some cars with an engine size less than two litres.

"There were a couple of reasons advanced for targeting vehicles with bigger engines. My question was why, what do we hope to achieve by this? There were reasons given along the lines of the dimensions of the vehicles, the fuel-efficiency of the vehicles, the carbon-footprint, etc. The point I was making was that none of those things were correlated to engine size."

The executive manager of the roads and traffic department, Tim O'Sullivan, who drew up the original recommendations, will now be asked to decided what an average length for a car is.

He had proposed that owners of cars with an engine above 2,000cc would pay €80 a year or €140 for two years for a residential parking permit, while other motorists would pay half that.

The amended proposals will be put before a meeting of Dublin City Council on February 5th and then will go out to public consultation. If passed, the proposals are expected to be implemented in June.