Pinching inches: UK city charges for parking permits based on a car's length

There are places in England where you need to pay for a parking permit to park on the street. English cities, however, are often not the most spacious places, so city boards are coming up with ways to encourage people to buy cars that take up less space. The city of Norwich, England, wants its residents to buy little hatchbacks, and is helping them decide to do that by charging them more money for a permit to park a longer car.

Permit prices will be divided into three categories -- lower, middle, and higher -- and the length of your car will decide how much you pay. The largest category, for which the price of a permit has jumped 90-percent, includes obvious barges like the Toyota Landcruiser and Rolls-Royce Phantom. But it also includes the Toyota Prius and Audi A4. The Ford Focus 5-door scrapes into the middle band, but the longer Focus 4-door gets the land yacht pricing of the higher band. If you live in Norwich and don't want your permit price to go up, we recommend something MINI or Micra...

Brian Morrey, a Norwich Councilor, said "It is a deliberate attempt to push people towards owning smaller cars, which generally have lower emissions but also don't cause such problems with parking." Of course other cities are watching to see how the experiment goes. So the question for new car buyers is: how badly do you need that trunk?

[Source: Daily Mail]