The Hague could soon raise parking rates for oversized cars, SUVs

The municipality of The Hague is considering charging higher parking fees for SUVs than for smaller cars. According to the city, these large vehicles take up too much of the already scarce space, are unsafe in traffic, and you really don’t need an off-road function on a city street, AD reports.

Exactly where the limit for “too large” will be is still to be determined. “But it concenrs cars that do not fit in parking spaces in terms of size and of which you can wonder whether it is even useful for them to drive on our street,” The Hague alderman Arjen Kapteijns told the newspaper.

“We are investigating whether we can make a link with the RDW database so that the size of a vehicle is clear when a license plate is scanned,” a municipal spokesperson told AD.

Last year, Amsterdam investigated whether it could charge higher parking fees for large and heavy cars, but the capital has since abandoned the idea. Higher parking fees based on weight would need a change to the national law, Amsterdam traffic alderman Melanie van der Horst told NPO Radio 1 a few months ago. “There is a national rule. We cannot change that.”

The path that The Hague is choosing has a better chance of success, but higher fees based on the size of the car also had disadvantages, Van der Horst said. “Then there have to be exceptions for, for example, work vans and delivery vans. And that makes it very complicated to actually do as a city,” she told AD.

The Hague also stressed that much needs to be worked out before it can implement this plan. Technical adjustments and new national rules will be needed to identify too-large cars via scans, for example. The city will lobby the government for those adjustments. It hopes to have a clearer plan of implementation next year.