Parking in Paris is not cheap. But if you roll into the French capital in an SUV, the city’s residents hope that you will deepen their pockets in the future. Drivers from outside the city will soon have to pay 18 euros per hour to park their SUVs in the city centre. Exorbitant pricing is the name of the game. After all, the city government’s goal in asking citizens to vote on a new pricing model is simply to alienate hated but popular urban SUVs.
Since the Paris vote, there has been a lot of debate around whether cities notorious for traffic congestion like Frankfurt should also adopt such a model. Approximately 400,000 people commute into major cities each morning and return to their suburban homes in the evening. The vast majority of them travel by car, as the German car club ADAC found in a survey. Their mood is already bad anyway. Those who commute by car are the most dissatisfied with Frankfurt’s transport infrastructure. “Residents surveyed rate car use within the city fairly positively, while commuters are primarily dissatisfied with car travel,” the ADAC study states. . “Key satisfaction criteria such as ease of access, city center parking fees, management of roadworks and parking space availability were particularly negatively rated.” It is clear how to view fines for large vehicles from to financial centers. But that’s exactly what proponents of turning traffic through price controls want.
Public transportation thinning service
Of course, it won’t help if Frankfurt’s public transport companies simply decimate their services. Bus and tram operators are touting new, more frequent services on their public transport networks as “honest timetables”. This is a reaction to the apparent lack of skilled workers willing to use the city’s public transport for meager wages. The new public transportation principle of “quality over quantity” will certainly not reduce long lines of cars. So, is it better to take advantage of the dreaded parking fees to prevent car obesity?
The “MyZeil” shopping mall has long been a prime example of this model. If you want to park under the famous shopping center of the city, on the basement floor during the day he will pay 5.50 euros per hour. If you want to park your car one floor below, you have to pay 4 euros per hour. For the other levels 3 and 4, the hourly wage is 2 euros. But price-sensitive drivers must manage to squeeze through an additional, frustratingly narrow exit. Scratch marks on the walls prove that this is not always successful. Therefore, a person who wants to park his SUV without the risk of repair-related follow-up costs will happily choose one of the more expensive levels. Perhaps this is what is called a market economy.