Un article de Bloomberg CityLab sur la tarification des vignettes SRRR selon la masse des véhicules
Texte complet : Meet the Montreal Mayor Who Declared War on SUVs
Meet the Montreal Mayor Who Declared War on SUVs
Street parking spots can be hard to come by in many Montreal neighborhoods, as most of the city’s distinctive duplex and triplex homes lack garages.
Photographer: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg
Oversized vehicles are devouring street parking spaces in the Canadian city. So one borough’s mayor is fighting back with bigger fees for hefty trucks and SUVs.
By David Zipper
May 15, 2024 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
On a brisk spring morning in Montreal, Francois Limoges set off on a walking tour through Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, the borough he leads as mayor. Wearing sneakers and an artfully tied scarf, Limoges, 52, proudly pointed out the area’s new corner stores, stormwater-friendly “green alleys,” and contraflow bike lanes. Then he paused, frowning, to point toward an SUV hugging the curb next to us.
“At 5 p.m., these will be everywhere,” he told me. “There will be nowhere to park.”
Parking is a perennial complaint in Rosemont: According to Limoges, an influx of larger vehicles has shrunk the borough’s on-street parking capacity by at least 4,000 spots. As a result, those owning smaller cars must prowl the neighborhood longer than ever to find a space.
So the mayor is fighting back with one of the few tools available to him: parking fees.
Last year, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie overhauled its residential parking permit system. Instead of scaling with engine power, the annual fees are now based on vehicle weight, which tightly correlates with size. Residents whose gas-powered cars weigh more than 1,850 kilograms (4,079 pounds), pay C$205 (US$150), while those owning the lightest cars pay C$115. (The weight thresholds are higher for electric or hybrid cars, and those with disabilities or low incomes pay the bottom rate no matter what they drive.)
Francois Limoges on the streets of Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie, one of 19 boroughs in the city of Montreal.Photo: David Zipper/Bloomberg CityLab
Paying more for parking may seem like a modest step, but it sends a clear message about the societal costs that oversized vehicles impose on everyone else. “It’s an idea that makes sense if you want to make a lively, a human-scale city,” Limoges said. “You cannot do nothing about the fact that cars are the size of Second World War tanks.” (He’s not wrong, by the way.)
The ongoing expansion of vehicle size is causing growing consternation in North America. Over four out every five new cars sold in the US are either an SUV or pickup truck, and the situation is much the same north of the border. In 2022, SUVs became a plurality of registered cars in Canada, and Ford’s F-series trucks are the country’s most popular vehicle model, just as in the US. In Montreal, city data shows that “light trucks” (mostly SUVs and pickups) comprised 41% of all registered cars in 2021, up from 18% 20 years earlier. The dominance of SUVs and trucks has helped give Canada a dubious distinction: According to a 2019 report by the International Energy Association, its auto fleet is the least fuel-efficient in the world.
Other downsides of car bloat are well established. Heavier cars exert more force in a crash and can take longer to come to a halt, endangering other road users. Taller front ends are more likely to strike a person’s torso than their legs, and they can conceal children or shorter people standing before them. Beyond their profligate consumption of fuel or electricity, which increases greenhouse gas emissions, heftier vehicles eat tires and brake pads, worsening particulate pollution that can foul the air and destroy ecosystems.
Expanding vehicle size has added pressure to Montreal’s transport network, which was already under strain. The city’s dense inner neighborhoods are lined with older duplexes and triplexes built for working-class residents (often featuring distinctively winding staircases). Few homes have garages, leaving car-owning residents to park on streets, where available space is limited. Despite a robust transit system and bikeshare network (North America’s first, called Bixi), car registrations in Montreal surged 21.7% between 2001 and 2021, almost twice as fast as its adult population, which rose 11.3%.
“We have more households where the number of cars is equal to the number of drivers,” Catherine Morency, a civil engineering professor at Polytechnique Montreal and a board member of Montreal’s parking authority, told me. “Cars used to be shared here, but not so much anymore.”
The surge in car ownership worries Montreal leaders like Limoges. With 140,000 residents, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie is among the more progressive of Montreal’s 19 boroughs. Strolling through the neighborhood, Limoges pointed out the numerous curb extensions that make pedestrians more visible at intersections. At one point he stopped to chat with a local artist painting a wooden bench placed atop one of them.
Limoges shows off an alley greening project in Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie.Photo: David Zipper/Bloomberg CityLab
Limoges is a big fan of such infrastructure, which he said can beautify a neighborhood while also making it safer. But curb extensions have been controversial, with some car owners bemoaning the perceived loss of on-street parking, which comprises about a quarter of the borough’s total road space.
According to Morency’s analysis, residents lodging such complaints are right about a decline in on-street parking capacity, but they blame the wrong culprit. In a study of the nearby Montreal borough of Outremont, Morency and several coauthors found that expanding the average car length from 5 meters (16.4 feet) to 5.5 meters (18 feet) decreases street parking spots by 9.3%, while an additional expansion from 5.5 meters to 6 meters (19.7 feet) causes a further loss of 7%. (For context, an F-150 truck and Cadillac Escalade SUV are 5.3 meters and 5.8 meters long, respectively.) As a result, the growing share of larger vehicles has caused many on-street parking spots to effectively disappear.
As in the US, Canadian city officials have limited power to counteract car bloat, since national and provincial governments handle vehicle safety and registration, respectively. But local leaders do have power over parking, and Limoges decided to wield it as a weapon against oversized vehicles. He presented Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie’s new weight-based permit system, which went into effect last summer, as beneficial for drivers as well as for the planet and road safety. Pushback has been negligible, he said.
“It’s strange bedfellows,” said Colleen Thorpe, the executive director of Equiterre, a Quebec environmental advocacy group that backed the parking reforms. Local leaders like Limoges “put in trees and cafes and took away parking spots. The next logical step was to bring up the equity question: If you’re taking up too much parking space, you’re taking it away from someone else.”
Morency, the engineering professor, is strongly supportive: “If you fly, you pay more if your luggage is too big,” she told me. “I don’t understand why cars are different.”
Still, it’s unclear that an additional C$90 per year is sufficient to tilt many vehicle purchases. Limoges acknowledged that he “couldn’t say” whether the new parking policy is affecting what residents drive, but he said that his primary goal was to spur a national debate about the societal costs of oversized vehicles. “We are doing our part with street permits,” he told me. “If the provincial government [of Quebec] does the same with registrations of cars, and if the federal government does the same with a special tax on heavy cars, of course it will change the habits of the people.”
Front balconies on triplexes in the Plateau Mont-Royal neighborhood of Montreal.Photographer: Christinne Muschi/Bloomberg
People do seem to be noticing. In January, months after Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie’s new policy went into effect, another Montreal borough followed its lead. In Plateau Mont-Royal, drivers of the heaviest vehicles now pay C$482.90 for an annual parking permit, twice as much as those with light cars. Limoges said that he’s answered questions from curious mayors throughout Quebec. In neighboring Ontario, last month a coalition of advocacy groups published a report to “address the danger of pickups and large SUVs to pedestrians and cyclists.”
Limoge’s example even attracted attention across the Atlantic: The mayor beamed while recounting how French media cited Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie when Parisians voted to triple SUV parking fees in February.
Thorpe said that she hopes Quebec follows the borough’s lead and starts charging SUV owners more to register oversized vehicles. “We need it at a provincial level,” she said. “Otherwise it will seem like a crazy idea of some crazy people living in the center of Montreal.”
In the US, city leaders in Washington, DC, have taken that approach, revising vehicle registration fees to scale sharply with weight. District owners of the most enormous vehicles now pay seven times more as those with small models. But the District is an anomaly among North American municipalities; as a city-state, it controls its own Department of Motor Vehicles. Car registration elsewhere is overseen by state officials whose interests may not align with urban priorities. States like New York and Colorado have considered following DC’s lead by tying registration fees to vehicle weight, but none has yet approved such a move.
Even if states refuse to take action against car bloat — and federal regulators continue to sit on their hands — US cities could still attack it through parking, a policy area that, as in Montreal, is largely within their domain. But I do not know of any US city where local officials have done so, perhaps for fear of sparking outrage among owners of extra-large vehicles.
If so, Rosemont-La Petite-Patrie’s experience suggests that such concerns may be overblown; with the right approach, at least some car owners will respond positively to the message that drivers of lengthy SUVs leave less room for everyone else. Activists and reformist leaders may want to test drive a new line of argument: Needlessly gigantic cars don’t just harm people and the environment, they also make it harder to find a place to park.
David Zipper is a Senior Fellow at the MIT Mobility Initiative, where he examines the interplay between transportation policy, technology and society.