airpollutionandmotorvehicles

1 Air Pollution and Motor Vehicles 1 Air pollution is increasingly becoming the focus of government and citizen concern around the globe. From Mexico City and New York, to Singapore and Tokyo, new solutions to this old problem are being proposed, trialled and implemented with ever increasing speed. It is feared that unless pollution reduction measures are able to keep pace with the continued pressures of urban growth, air quality in many of the world’s major cities will deteriorate beyond reason. 2 Action is being taken along several fronts through new legislation, improved enforcement and innovative technology. In Los Angeles, State regulations are forcing manufactures to try to sell ever cleaner cars their first of the cleanest, titled ‘Zero Emission Vehicles’, have to be available soon, since they are intended to make up 2 per cent of sales in 1997. Local authorities in London are campaigning to be allowed to enforce anti-pollution laws themselves; at present only the police have the power to do so, but they tend to be busy elsewhere. In Singapore, renting out road space to users is the new way of the future. 3 When Britain’s Royal Automobile Club monitored the exhausts of 60,000 vehicles, it found that 12 percent of them produced more than half the total pollution. Older cars were the worst offenders; through a sizeable number of quite new cars were also identified as gross polluters, they were simply badly tuned. California has developed a scheme to get these gross polluters off the street they offer a flat 700 for any old, run-down vehicle driven in by its owner. The aim is to remove the heaviest-polluting, most decrepit vehicles from the roads. 4 As part of a European Union environmental programme, a London council is testing an infra-red spectrometer from the University of Denver in Colorado. It gauges the pollution from a passing vehiclemore useful than the annual stationery test that is the British standard todayby bouncing a beam through the exhaust and measuring what gets blocked. The council’s next step may be to link the system to a computerised video camera able to read number plates automatically. 5 The effort to clean up cars may do little to cut pollution if nothing is done about the tendency to drive them more. Los Angeles has some of the world’s cleanest carsfar better than those of Europebut the total number of miles those cars drive continues to grow. One solution is car-pooling, an arrangement in which a number of people who share the same destination share the use of one car. However, the average number of people in a car on the freeway in Los Angeles, which is 1.3, has been falling steadily. Increasing it would be an effective way of reducing emissions as well as easing congestion. The trouble is, Los Angeles seem to like being alone in their cars. 6 Singapore has for a while had a scheme that forces drivers to buy a badge if they wish to visit a certain part of the city. Electronic in