The measure to make vehicles weighing 1.6 tons and over pay 3x the parking rates for the first two hours has passed in Paris.
Now, let's get that in place for London and many other other places to help slow, and even reverse, this trend towards massive personal vehicles.
The problem with your point is your reinventing the homo oeconomicus except for transportation. The underlying assumption is that if only the public transit (walkability, bikeability, what-have-you-ability) is good enough, people would not drive their cars.
And there's truth to it insofar as you take something like Phoenix, AZ or something and just make cars more expensive it ain't gonna do shit except fleece people. But Paris isn't that, at some point you have to grapple with the fact that you also have to actively get people out of cars via incentives to do so because there's a sizeable amount of people who are terribly, terribly car brained and will not change, because they're not being rational about it.
I'm not reinventing homo economicus here. I'm saying that if sufficient infrastructure exists then it's fine to just ban SUVs entirely because they're not necessary. What I'm arguing against is creating a two tiered system where rich can flaunt the rules that apply to everyone else. I honestly don't understand why this is so hard a concept for people to get.
I think I'm a big dumdum because I didn't realize until literally this comment that this is the other, better, non-carbrained solution. I was over here like "so what, you just want people with SUV's to decide of their own accord not to drive them into downtown because suddenly they realize they're bad people for doing so? Never gonna happen."
But now that I see your much better idea, simply ban all SUVs from Paris, I'm entirely on board! I do think that's going to be a harder law to pass than hiking parking fees, but it would definitely be a much better one!
Right, it's more work to ban SUVs entirely, but it's definitely a better goal overall. I fundamentally dislike the idea of creating rules that only apply to the poors while the rich are at best mildly inconvenienced. We need to strive to build a fair society where laws apply to everyone equally.
There's a great quote from Anatole France that sums this up: