Bottom gear, Ep.2: How come these bloated SUVs don't get parking tickets?

Face to face: a 20th century car meets an enormous and very shiny van, also known as an SUV, in a street in Brixton. Note
how about a foot of the Audi oozes over the white lines of the parking bay. How come this is allowed?

Years ago I was mortified to find a yellow envelope stuck on the windscreen of my decrepit Renault, which I had left, a week earlier, in a residents' parking bay near my flat, one I paid £140 a year to use.

It turned out that the back wheels were more outside the white line than in it, an inexcusable bit of  sloppy parking. I paid up, and tried to forget it. But these days it seems cars can park with much more of their body mass outside the lines, with impunity.

If you drive or cycle, walk, run or even skate around London's inner suburban streets you'll have noticed that the bit between the parked cars on each side is getting narrower and narrower, as the cars themselves get wider.

It becomes a dreadful farce trying to drive or cycle down these streets. Lots of flashing of headlamps, a quick dash to the next space, letting or not letting the other driver through, wondering if that white van is really going to keep coming on at that speed. And whether there's a space enough for your narrow handlebars between the wing-mirrors of the SUVs and the sharp front end of the fast-approaching Porsche 911.

What I am really moaning about today, in this second episode of a long-term, lonely, hypocritical and very personal war against cars (see Episode 1 about hooters here), is the width of some of the things that are now sold as private conveyances, rather than HGVs.

If you are stupid enough (as I am) to live in a wealthy zone 2 suburb you will know that the majority of vehicles parked outside those humble £2.5million workers' cottages are whacking great wagons. They're called SUVs, and they are made by many different firms, but under their flashy skins they are all much the same.  The angry, aggressive styling which their buyers seem to crave often makes them look even bigger than they are: some resemble children's inflatable toys that have been pumped up to the point where they are in danger of bursting. Many look to be (perhaps reflecting their owners) morbidly obese.

These vehicles are indeed big -  most of them are over 2 metres wide - that is, nearly 25 per cent wider than a 1970s Renault 5.  That's 20cm wider than the national minimum width for parking bays. Why, you might ask, didn't the manufacturers check this out before selling these monsters in the UK? Surely it's easier and cheaper to slightly re-design a vehicle than to widen all of the nation's streets. You get the feeling such vehicles are designed for the US market where there are wider roads, wider bottoms and fewer pedestrians. Or for the Gulf States, where there are lots of sand dunes. Or of course for Clarksonshire or whatever they call the Cotswolds these days, where most of these elephantine carriages will be parked on a private crunchy gravel drive.

No-one would mind much if they were genuine utility vehicles, like ambulances or delivery vans. No, they are "sports" utility vehicles. It's the sporty bit that rankles, along with their flashy styling and often thuggish aspect. Plus the sad fact that their owners usually have nothing more than a few bags of Waitrose shopping in there. And they seem to think it's OK to just stop outside their houses, and not to attempt parking manoeuvres of any sort.

Disagree? Just look at some of these monsters:

One of the worst offenders. This BMW XL5 (named after one of the Thunderbirds) is about two feet over the line. It
was there in a Clapham street for days and didn't get a ticket!

Another BMW in another Clapham street. This is parked as well as it possibly can be and yet it is still over the white
line. Why doesn't the council charge extra for parking these behemoths?

Sometimes it's not just the width of the SUV, but the fact their sheer size makes them difficult to park accurately up against
the kerb. Or maybe the drivers are just as arrogant as their cars look.

Yes, the original SUV - Range Rover was the first, and is still the worst of this baleful species of suburban battle-wagons.

Fast and bulbous? Typical that Porsche should get onto this fat band-wagon, as though their sports cars were not annoying enough.

What is it about these vehicles, why are they so popular, and why do the authorities let them get away with it?

The huge popularity must come down to a few basic human weaknesses:

A) As humans get richer they eat more and get fatter, and so have wider bottoms. So they need wider seats to accommodate these bottoms.

B) As humans get richer, they also feel more threatened, so they need things that look like military APCs to protect themselves and their families. Hence the popularity of these tank-like vehicles.

C) As more humans get richer, fatter and more aggressive they need to express these qualities in ways that differentiate them from their rich, fat, angry, aggressive neighbours. So they compete to get the biggest, widest, loudest, angriest, most fuck-you car.

That's all obvious - but why doesn't our lovely council do something to rein in these very basic human failings?

The police stop people doing lots of things in public. Sadly there's not as yet a law to prevent these very rich people, albeit living in the what used to be the modest homes of 19th century clerical and working classes, from splurging their wealth in the faces and eyes and ears of the few remaining members of that older layer of resident.

Even when they're young and single and without wide-bottomed offspring in super-wide pavement-clogging buggies, these rich ones often acquire big fat sports cars which are just as wide and difficult to park in south London parking bays as SUVs.

God, we have no hope.

Parking bays are supposed to be at least 180cm wide from kerb to white line. But to my horror I hear that some councils are thinking of widening bays  just because the car industry has decided it can make more money by selling over-wide vehicles.

Just read this crazy article in AutoExpress. Oh so it's safety features that account for this shoulder-padded look is it? Safety for whom? Not for me as I try to squeeze my bike past your paddy-wagon with another one approaching fast with its quartz-halogen mainbeams and LED fairy-lights blazing and its super-loud horn inverting eardrums of all in the block.

And yet National Car Parks says it is willingly widening bays to help the drivers of these vehicles. At least half the people interviewed in this BBC news item seem to think that's a good thing - all the while people are complaining that our roads are too crowded.

A final straw? Yes. Now I understand those kids who go up and down the zone 2 streets with a sharp key in their hand.