Those French, so logical and practical, yet so infuriating to the American sensibility of freedom and waste. Ten years after the Hummer was introduced as the ultimate extension of small apartment masquerading as automobile, this seems like a sensible step, especially in cities where there are no mountains to climb or icy roads to navigate. Bulky, gas-guzzling sports utility vehicles (SUVs) could be banned from the chic but traffic-clogged streets of Paris within 18 months following a resolution passed by the city council.
Denis Baupin, a leading Green party councilor who tabled the resolution, says the designer jeeps are “not suited to towns” and he could not understand why people drove the fashionable “off-roaders.”
“They’re polluters, they’re space-occupiers, they’re dangerous for pedestrians and other road users. They’re a caricature of a car.”
I would not shed one crocodile tear if San Francisco, the most French of American cities, decided to also do away with SUVs. Our Supervisors are at war, instead, on all cars with a mission to slowly eliminate all parking and give over extra lanes to bicycles. Unfortunately, their brains apparently run on only one track since they don’t ever seem to ponder the mass transit needs to replace cars in a city with many unscalable hills
