Stephen Vance, Editor
With their initial approval of a vehicle idling bylaw, Meaford’s council has adopted a smart approach to the issue.
Rather than beating residents over the head with an all-encompassing (and difficult to enforce) bylaw that would prevent the idling of vehicles everywhere, including private driveways and fast-food drive-thrus, council has instead taken a softer approach that will see vehicle idling prohibited on municipal properties,
which of course would include street-side parking spots, combined with a public education initiative to remind motorists of the damage (and expense) caused by letting our motors run while our wheels aren’t rolling.
The reality is, modern vehicles don’t need all that much time to warm up anymore. A few seconds is really all it takes, even in the winter months (if you really want your vehicle to warm up quickly, the experts say to drive it), so the two minutes that will be allowed (five minutes for diesel engines) under the new bylaw should be plenty of time should you return to your street-parked car in the dead of winter after having been at work all day.
Motorists don’t just idle their vehicles in the winter to warm them up however. Our former office at the corner of Boucher and Sykes Streets was directly across the street from a convenience store, and several (and I do mean several) times each day vehicles would park in front of our office, and while the drivers would run into the convenience store their engines kept running. In the summer I presume the reason is to maintain a nice, cold, air conditioned temperature inside the vehicle, and in the winter, to keep the heat blasting, but both practices are wasteful and unnecessary.
Is your car really going to become unbearably hot after a two minute run into a convenience store should you cut the engine? Will your fingers really fall off, if the interior of your car cools down a few degrees while you pop into the corner store to pick up some bread and cigarettes in January? Absolutely not (though the bylaw won’t be applied on days when the temperature is below zero, or above 30 degrees Celsius). And I would add, that on a hot summer day, when we had the office door propped open (we had no air conditioning in that office), the fumes from idling vehicles that would flood in through our open door were enough to make you gag, and they literally gave me headaches.
For those that still to this day like to argue that our vehicles use more fuel in the process of being started than when left to idle, that is simply untrue – unless you will be idling for less than ten seconds, according to the experts. Anything longer than ten seconds, and you should be shutting your engine off for the good of the air we breathe, the life of your vehicle, and for your wallet.
It’s no secret that our love affair with the automobile has come with costs. The burning of fossil fuels to move ourselves and our products from place to place has been somewhat of a necessary evil given the direction our civilization has gone over the past century, and the emissions from all those vehicles on our roads have damaged the quality of our air and have helped to put the future of our environment in jeopardy. That automobiles are a bad thing for our environment is not denied, even by the most ardent climate change deniers, but there are some small ways that we can help minimize the damage, and not letting our vehicles idle is one of them.
Just as it took time for seat-belts to be fully embraced by motorists who previously had not had to worry about such silly and annoying devices (as they were at one time considered), conditioning drivers to shut off their engines when their cars aren’t moving will also take some time, and while the most hardcore environmentalists might want to see a heavy hand from governments with regard to the idling issue, we all know that such an approach is unlikely to succeed, and we are better off to try and continuously educate and remind motorists, rather than to try and fine them into submission, so this softer approach approved by council is likely the better road to travel.
For those die-hards who absolutely oppose idling bylaws, don’t get your fan belts in a knot – the enforcement of the bylaw will be complaint driven, and will be the responsibility of our bylaw enforcement officer, of which we have just one full-time in this municipality, so take your chances if you must, but don’t be surprised if your kids or grandkids start reminding you that you are damaging the environment that they will have to live in in the decades to come, just as our kids have played a role in getting us to quit smoking, or to wear our seat-belts.
It’s a simple thing really. If your car ain’t moving, the engine shouldn’t be running.
