Yeah, weight is really the best method.
Right, just until you realize that 1.6 tons for a ICE car is basically a medium size car (my Scenic score 1.4 tons for example) and 2 tons exclude a lot of electric cars (for example 3 out of 4 Tesla)
The car I had before I went car-free weighed 1.3 tons and was big enough to sleep in with 2 people on a real mattress, or to comfortably carry 5 people with their luggage, or transport a fridge.
1.6 tons is quite frankly an insane weight for a vehicle to transport an 80kg human around. That is 20 times the weight of what you want to transport, not to mention the volume overhead and required space on the road including safety distances.
As long as you are alone, I agree. But if you have a family a somewhat bigger car is not that wasted and the 1.6 tons limit cover a lot of cars that can be used by a family.
If they really wanted to do something for the environment, like they justified the misure, they should have not put a limit on the EV (at least for now) and they should have used the engine capacity or power.If anything people had bigger families in the past but somehow the capacity per car weight has gone down significantly, both for people and cargo.
If anything people had bigger families in the past
Last time I was in France (4 years ago, before Covid) it was not uncommon to see families with 3 children, so I don’t know… maybe there are not that many in Paris…
The current fertility rate for France in 2024 is 1.847 births per woman, a 0.05% decline from 2023
Sounds about right. Western and Central Europe is aging rapidly. I doubt Paris is much of an exception to that rule.