Excessive Idling, Excessively Dangerous for People and Planet
Thanks to one of the readers of another blog, I have take recently named Excessive Idling as my number one environmental pet peeve. (For those of you championing other environmental causes, these doesn’t mean I’m ignoring my other pet peeves, this is just the latest).
Although typically ignored or played down by state and even national environmental regulators, excessive idling is a huge polluter of air quality (the air we all breathe, by the way, the smog from LA doesn’t stay there) and is even more irritating because it is the direct result of lazy car addicts.
That’s right, I said lazy. And I’m not afraid to point that finger at myself, we’re all guilty here. We call it “heating up the car” during winter months, and hide behind myths like “it takes more gas to turn the car on than to keep it running.” Flimsy excuses. The simple truth is that the best way to warm up your car or truck is to drive it and studies have shown that frequent restarting has little impact on engine parts such as battery and starter motor.
The Colorado town I live in is “blessed” to be split right down the middle by active freight train tracks, and almost 5 times a day, one half of the town is cut off from the other. Despite signs at most track crossings, I can’t believe the amount of people that will sit, foot on the brake, in their running cars for up to 10 minutes while the train passes. (This was even happening over the summer, when gas was $500 a gallon). It makes me so heated I just want to get out of my car, knock on their windows, and ask them what the hell they’re thinking.
And now, new research published in PLoS ONE Journal suggests that “pollution from traffic can ‘reprogram’ genes in the womb, increasing the risk for asthma.” Even if you don’t buy the studies findings that fetuses breathing in exhaust will have asthma, doctors are already sure that “pollution triggers symptoms in two thirds of people with asthma, and many say that a reduction in air pollution would make the single biggest difference to their quality of life.”
So I beg you to be more conscious of your idling. A good rule of thumb to remember is: “Idling gets zero miles per gallon.”
Wear some gloves and tough it out in the chilly car on your way to work (your car will actually heat up faster if you just start driving it). Turn your car off while you run into the convenience store or dropping those movies off at BlockBuster.
And for god’s sake, kill the engine at train crossings. No one wants to deal with a crazy blogger at the window.
(Thank you to Derek Markham at Eco Child’s Play for his post, which inspired this one).