Toyota Tundra and Ram 1500 owners can leave our parking spaces alone | Opinion

News broke this week that Standards Australia have begun a push to have our parking spaces enlarged to better fit the giant, mostly American vehicles now crowding our roads.

The idea is to make our standard parking spaces 20cm longer, ostensibly to make it easier for people to park their giant vehicles without poking out over the lines.

Crazy, right? Finding a parking spot in a busy Aussie carpark is already right up there with a tooth extraction, sans anaesthetic, on the fun-ways-to-spend-a-weekend-morning scale, and now we’re going to have fewer, but larger, spots to accommodate people who bought a giant car?

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It’s ridiculous. I’ve just spent a weekend in Melbourne, where pants so big it looks like their owners might take off in a stiff breeze are now right on trend, but I haven’t heard of any campaigns to make the tram seats any wider. I guess the idea is that you bought them, so you deal with it.

Speaking of which, some 10,000 people, give or take, purchased one of these giant pickups in 2024. In a market in excess of one million vehicle sales. So we’re not talking a sizeable proportion of the population here.

Interestingly, even the owners of said parking spaces are against the idea, with the Shopping Centre Council of Australia describing it as a “solution in search of a problem“.

“As Australia’s largest operator of parking facilities, our experience tells us that Standards Australia’s proposal is a ‘solution’ in search of a problem,” that organisation’s chief executive Angus Nardi told the Sydney Morning Herald.

Others suggest we enlarge the spots only if we also enlarge the registration costs for bigger cars, while developers say any changes would be slow and expensive to implement, and would result in the fewer spaces for the rest of us.

But my argument is far more simple. If you buy a house next to a loud and busy pub, and then complain about the noise, then you’re rightly ridiculed.

So what’s the difference if you buy a vehicle that could carry a full-grown elephant in its tray, and then complain that parking is a challenge?

That sounds like a 'you' problem.