Truck's parking fail fuels anger among Aussies: 'We don't need them'
The large truck trend has not gone down well in Australia.
Parking fails are rife across Australia and now there's a new player in town some feel is only exasperating the issue.
The surging popularity of US-style, oversized trucks among Aussies has seen a big spike in the giant vehicles on our roads, but not everyone is impressed.
A photo of one such vehicle's suspect parking in a Westfield car park in Melbourne has once again drawn criticism of the utes and those who buy them.
While some believed the ute in question had taken a whopping four spots to park their vehicle, several people pointed out it was in fact just left in the middle of the traffic lane.
"If you come to Fountain Gate right now you’ll see this fine specimen parked in the middle of the road," the Reddit user who shared the photo revealed.
The image triggered a wave of comments expressing a sentiment widely shared about the vehicles.
"We don't need these huge trucks in Australia. Utes have worked for ages," one person said.
"The yank-tank owners simply need to buy a smaller car," another wrote.
Calls for big car tax
Monash University lecturer Julian O'Shea, who explores sustainable transport options as part of his work, is one of the many vocal critics of the surge in large American pick-up trucks.
He told Yahoo News Australia in August there would need to be significant changes to infrastructure to accomodate these vehicles.
"The question becomes, how do we use this space? If we want to make our carparks bigger, we get fewer of them, we lose space for bike lanes, we lose space for parks, we lose space for shops," he said.
"Some ideas that different countries are using that we could look into are higher parking fees for these cars, which cause more damage to the road because they're so much heavier," he continued.
"And just making more spaces available for other groups. So saying, 'look, if these cars exist, that's fine, but it's probably inappropriate for them to be around schools, or to be inside our CBD where space is at a premium'."
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