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Paris prepared to ban gas-guzzling off-road vehicles

Oversized, gas-guzzling 4x4s could be banned from the increasingly traffic-clogged streets of Paris within the next 18 months following a resolution passed by the city's council.

"Off-road vehicles are just not suited to towns and you have to wonder why people drive them," Denis Baupin, a senior Green party councillor who tabled the resolution, said on Wednesday.

"They're polluters, they're space-occupiers, they're dangerous for pedestrians and other road users. They're a caricature of a car," he said.

Under the resolution, sports utility vehicles (SUVs) could be banned from Paris city center during peak pollution periods and their owners denied residents' parking permits.

Off-roaders could also be barred from protected areas like the Bois de Boulogne and the banks of the river Seine.

The plan, which would require the approval of the city's police chief and is certain to meet stiff opposition from the motoring lobby, follows similar remarks by London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who last month described 4x4 vehicles as "bad for London -- completely unnecessary" and called their owners "complete idiots."

A recent British survey found that just one in eight 4x4 drivers had driven their car off-road, and six in 10 never take it out of town.

The vehicles are an increasingly common sight in Paris's wealthier quarters.

Sales surged by 11 percent in France last year and the cars make up nearly 5 percent of the market.

A recent survey by France's Agency for the Environment and Energy Management, Ademe, placed Mercedes' deluxe but bulky G500 off-roader top of a "list of shame" of the most environmentally harmful cars in Europe, and underlined the fact that of the 18 vehicles on that list, 14 are SUVs.

A similar British study by the Environmental Transport Association, based on manufacturers' figures, named the Range Rover 4.6 HSE as the dirtiest car on the road.

Baupin said Paris could not legally ban SUVs outright, but could include a clause in its next transport and traffic plan, due to be adopted next year, restricting vehicles that did not meet minimum environmental requirements.
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