Car idling: More than just cooling your car
When waiting for someone in a car, please turn off the Motor.
Have you ever seen a huge crowd of cars parked around the school waiting to pick up the school kids? Do you ever notice that most of the cars leave their motor running while being parked?
Car idling can release toxic air pollution while burning fossil fuels, and that can be dangerous for the environment. There already is a law which prohibits idling more than 5 minutes for school buses and some heavy duty vehicles, however that is only for some types of cars. Why don’t other cars have this law too?
Idling can actually waste lots of fuel, almost as much fuel as the car driving itself! According to the Natural Resources Canada website, a car with a 3 liter engine left for ten minutes will burn 300 milliliters of fuel. It might not sound like much, but if you think about all the other idling cars in the world, it adds up to tons of unnecessarily wasted fuel. In fact, avoiding idling for just 3 minutes every day, we could save up to 630 million liters of fuel per year, which is equal to taking 320,000 cars off the road!
Now what about diesel school buses? Even worse. They can waste up to 8 liters of fuel every day as a result of idling! Amir Khajepour, a mechanical engineering professor at the University of Waterloo in Ontario, said that adds up to 10,000 kilograms of greenhouse gasses per bus each year!
I wish that these laws, which prohibit idling, could apply to all cars instead of only certain vehicles. Even if you have a regular car and are not breaking the law, that still doesn’t mean you should idle because it pollutes the air. Also, manufacturers could create a small switch inside of a car that turns off the idling car after a set amount of time when not driving. They also could have a timer that automatically turns on when the car is idling so the person could be warned.
This can show us that although car idling may not seem to have a big impact, it adds up to a much bigger problem: climate change.