It's not as if parking in Paris has ever been cheap. But if you drive into the French capital with your SUV, the city's residents want you to dig deep into your pockets in future. Drivers from out of town will soon have to pay 18 euros per hour to park their SUV in the city centre. Prohibitive pricing is the name of the game. After all, the aim of the city government, which has asked its citizens to vote on the new pricing model, is simply to keep away the hated but big-selling city SUVs.

Since the Paris vote, the debate has been raging everywhere as to whether notoriously traffic-plagued cities like Frankfurt should also introduce such models. Around 400,000 people commute to the Main metropolis every morning, only to return to their homes in the suburbs in the evening. The vast majority of them do this by car, as the German automobile club ADAC has just discovered in a study. And their mood is already bad anyway. Commuters by car are by far the most dissatisfied with Frankfurt's transport infrastructure. "While the residents surveyed rate the use of cars in the city as rather positive, commuters are predominantly dissatisfied when travelling by car," states the ADAC study. "Important satisfaction criteria such as accessibility, parking fees in the city centre, roadworks management and the availability of parking spaces are rated particularly negatively." It is obvious how commuters and visitors would view penalty charges for hefty cars from the surrounding area to the financial centre. But that is precisely what the advocates of a price-controlled traffic turnaround are after.

Of course, it doesn't help that Frankfurt's public transport company has just thinned out its services. The bus and tram operator is marketing the new, more frequent service in the public transport network as an "honest timetable". It is a reaction to the glaring shortage of skilled workers who are willing to navigate public transport through the city for negligible wages. The new public transport principle of "quality over quantity" will certainly not reduce the long queues of cars. So, would it be better to use scary car parking charges to combat automobile obesity?

The "MyZeil" shopping mall has long been a prime example of this model: If you want to park under the famous shopping centre in the city, you pay 5.50 euros per hour on the first basement level during the day. If you park your car one level below, you have to pay 4 euros per hour. On the other levels, 3 and 4, the hourly rate is 2 euros. However, price-sensitive drivers also have to squeeze through the additional and irritatingly narrow exits. Scratch marks on the walls prove that this is not always successfully done. Anyone who wants to park their SUV without the risk of repair-related follow-up costs is, therefore, happy to opt for one of the more expensive levels. Presumably, this is what you call the market economy.