Mr. James Nix:

It is a difficult area to regulate. What we generally see is that since the mid-1990s, the top sellers have become about 30 cm wider. If you imagine a street with two cars parked in parallel, with two lanes of moving traffic, that is a cumulative loss of space on that street of 1.2 m for cyclists. If two vehicles are over-parking or parking two wheels on the pavement, that is a loss of space to the pedestrians. There is no width limit in Europe for light duty vehicles. There is for trucks and buses, so it is a huge regulatory gap at European level. There is some discussion in the Netherlands about taxing width, but it is at the earliest stage and is difficult to do without a European regulatory framework.

In a way there is a similar conundrum on bonnet height. It would be almost impossible to get an aerodynamic, pedestrian-friendly, cycle-friendly bonnet profile through the European lawmaking process. It is obviously desirable but the industry is too strong to allow pedestrian-friendly vehicle fronts.