\n<\/p>\n
Cardiff council will force drivers with larger vehicles to pay more for parking, becoming the first local authority in the UK to impose a parking premium to combat the dangers of larger vehicles.<\/p>\n
Councillors voted on Thursday to approve a new parking plan for the city whereby owners of larger vehicles will be charged more for parking permits because their cars \u201ctake up more parking space and are a danger to other road users\u201d.<\/p>\n
The plan states that vehicles that weigh more than 2,400kg fully laden will be subject to a surcharge \u201cto encourage drivers to switch to smaller vehicles\u201d; this will later be reduced to 2,000kg for non-electric vehicles.<\/p>\n
There has been a growing backlash against the sharp increase in large vehicles on roads, which cause more pollution and are more likely to cause fatalities if involved in a collision.<\/p>\n
Research has shown that sports utility vehicles (SUVs), which combine features of a passenger car with an off-road vehicle, have increased from 3% to 30% of existing cars in the past two decades.<\/p>\n
Oliver Lord, the UK head of the campaign group Clean Cities, said \u201cother cities across the UK could learn from Cardiff\u2019s leadership\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cCardiff is showing real vision by standing up to the SUV \u2018carspreading\u2019 that is taking over our streets,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s only fair that those driving the biggest, heaviest and most polluting vehicles pay more for the extra space and danger they bring.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Welsh capital is following in the footsteps of Paris, which last year tripled parking charges for SUV-style vehicles, leading to a two-thirds reduction in the number of SUVs using surface parking.<\/p>\n
The decision in Cardiff follows a public consultation in which two-thirds (66%) of respondents said they agreed that larger vehicles should pay more for permits.<\/p>\n
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Privacy Notice: <\/strong>Newsletters may contain information about charities, online ads, and content funded by outside parties. If you do not have an account, we will create a guest account for you on theguardian.com to send you this newsletter. You can complete full registration at any time. For more information about how we use your data see our Privacy Policy. We use Google reCaptcha to protect our website and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.<\/span><\/p>\n after newsletter promotion<\/p>\n Dan De\u2019Ath, the cabinet member for transport, said SUVs were \u201cmuch larger than your average car, they produce far more wear and tear on our roads, but fundamentally if you hit a child while driving a heavy SUV the chances of that child dying are grossly inflated\u201d.<\/p>\n He said: \u201cWe don\u2019t think it\u2019s unreasonable to ask people driving those kinds of vehicles to pay a little bit more for road wear and the extra space they take up. We\u2019re not talking about SUV-shaped cars, we\u2019re talking about very heavy American-style vehicles.<\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s not about banning things, it\u2019s about gently encouraging behaviour change.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Cardiff council will force drivers with larger vehicles to pay more for parking, becoming the first local authority in the UK to impose a parking premium to combat the dangers of larger vehicles. Councillors voted on Thursday to approve a new parking plan for the city whereby owners of larger vehicles will be charged more<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":28540,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[4494,5313,914,495,12523,7121,12034,720],"class_list":{"0":"post-28539","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-cardiff","9":"tag-charges","10":"tag-council","11":"tag-higher","12":"tag-impose","13":"tag-larger","14":"tag-parking","15":"tag-vehicles"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28539","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=28539"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28539\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/28540"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=28539"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=28539"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=28539"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}