Worshiping Idles
H-97 will not become law this year, and even its chief cheer-leader understands why.
The House Natural Resources Committee “had its hands full with Vermont Yankee decommissioning and renewable energy matters,” said Wayne Michaud, the director of Idle-Free VT.
Beyond that, Michaud, acknowledged, the bill wasn’t really ready to become law. It would need some changes, he said, and as written, “enforcement would be very difficult.”
The bill would ban big trucks from idling on the public roads for more than five minutes. Violators could pay a $500 fine.
Wayne Michaud
It’s not exactly a radical proposal. Lots of states, including the other five in New England, have similar laws. A Burlington ordinance imposes a $40 fine on anyone leaving any vehicle idling for more than five minutes, but only between April 1 and November 1, so it doesn’t keep anyone from warming up the car on a cold winter day. Other cities around the country and even more in Canada have imposed various kinds of anti-idling laws.
Vermont will not. At least not yet.
So why bother to discuss it?
Because both the proposal and its troubles illustrate some interesting realities about public life these days: the complications involved in getting an issue onto the public radar screen; the benefit-but also the disadvantage – of requiring strict scientific evidence in public debate; the inevitability of a certain amount of subjectivity in some disputes.
It’s easy to see why some people want to reduce vehicle idling. It dirties the air, endangering health and exacerbating global warming. It wastes gasoline and therefore money. Idling is one of those offenses in which the villain is the victim. Leaving your car motor idling while you run into the convenience store for coffee is like burning money.
But just because people think idling is a bad idea doesn’t mean they’re going to do much about it. So far, at least, the anti-idling campaign has not had much impact. The Legislature did outlaw school bus idling on school property two years ago. But there the anti-idlers had key allies – parents and teachers, already organized and always a political force.
On their own, the anti-idlers have been less successful. One reason is that they have no full time operative. Michaud, 61, who lives near Bristol, earns his living as an illustrator and graphic artist. Idle-Free VT is strictly a part-time operation for him.
And he’s not a pro. He’s energetic and dedicated, but inexperienced at playing the political game – forging alliances, getting into the newspapers and on the air, making some trouble. According to its web site, Idle-Free Vermont wanted to get an anti-idling resolution on town meeting ballots earlier this month. It didn’t work.
The organization’s major ally is the Vermont branch of the American Lung Association, whose director of Health Promotion and Public Policy, Rebecca Ryan, testified on behalf of the bill before the House Natural Resources Committee.
Her testimony supplied the scientific evidence about the dangers of idling. Motor vehicle exhaust is unhealthy, especially for the elderly, people with respiratory diseases, and children , more than 12,000 of whom in Vermont have asthma. Truck idling, the Environmental Protection Agency has estimated, consumes more than 1 billion gallons of diesel fuel, and spews 11 million tons of carbon dioxide into the air.
What was not in her testimony, because it is not available, was any estimate as to how much idling goes on in Vermont, how many gallons of gas it wastes, how much it pollutes the air here. It is not available because it is all but impossible to gauge. No one is going to assign monitors to stand in every parking lot in the state counting and timing the idling cars.
That’s why the bill itself could assert only that if ”every driver of a motor vehicle in Vermont avoided idling a motor vehicle for just five minutes a day‚ the state would save millions of gallons of fuel and would prevent thousands of tons of carbon dioxide from entering the atmosphere and contributing to climate change.”
How many millions of gallons or thousands of tons? Nobody knows. The EPA has determined that truck exhaust is “a likely human carcinogen.”
But the “likely” there indicates some degree of uncertainty.
Still, this could be one case where the demand for conclusive scientific evidence goes too far. Clearly spewing all that stuff into the air does some harm. All those other states didn’t pass anti-idling laws because they like to pass laws. And what’s the purpose of idling? It’s not a Constitutional right. It is, often, a socially and environmentally damaging self-indulgence, Except on the coldest of winter days, most vehicles don’t need more than 30 seconds or so of idling before moving. Even on those sub-zero days, a minute or two of warm-up should suffice, according to the EPA and Natural Resources Canada.
Unless, of course, the window is fogged up. Or unless the driver doesn’t want to sit in a cold car.
This, as Michaud acknowledged, is where the subjectivity comes in. Some people just don’t like being cold, even for the few minutes it takes for a car to warm up. With or without remote starters, some folks start up their cars on cold winter days and then run back into the house for another cup of coffee until the car gets warmer.
It’s tempting for those of us (yes, I’m among them) who’d rather dress warmly and just start driving to consider these cold-averse people sort of wimpy. But different folks have different cold-tolerance strokes.
Less forgivable are the drivers who leave the car running while they pop into the convenience store. The car isn’t going to get that cold in the minute or so the drivers are inside.
Michaud said that like the “click it or ticket” seat belt campaign, the anti-idling effort should combine education with law enforcement, perhaps with more emphasis on the former. Some places are already cooperating, he said, such as the Vermont State Employees Credit Union, which put up an anti-idling sign at one its drive-up ATMs (pictured above).
Law enforcement, even for big trucks, will have to wait. Until the anti-idling movement gets a professional who knows how to mobilize public opinion. Or until the price of gasoline goes back up to four dollars and higher. Or maybe just until the trucking industry realizes (as some trucking firms apparently do) that the more states that pass laws prohibiting their drivers from excessive idling, the more money the companies will save on fuel.
Tags: trucks, vehicle idling
March 25th, 2009 at 11:18 am
What we need to do is make idlers “that guy”, like smokers, litterers and people who park in handicapped spaces without placards.
When my hubby and I are in parking lots, we like to joke about stealing the cars that are idling outside in the parking lot of the grocery store. (The grocery store?! Seriously guys?!) I think the best way to prevent idling is for people to mobilize a publicity campaign where idlers are thought of as 1. wimpy 2. wasteful/stupid and 3. self-absorbed polluters.
Hey, it worked for smoking.