Oxygen fans should tune into a free talk this week on how they can help keep the air clean by shutting off their cars.
The Alberta Capital Airshed is hosting a free webinar Thursday Jan. 19 on the effects of idling vehicles on air quality.
The talk is part of an ongoing series on air quality run in partnership with the West Central Airshed Society, said organizer Julie Kusiek.
Air quality around St. Albert took a nose dive for much of the week of Jan. 11 when foggy smog trapped pollutants in the region, Kusiek said. Much of that poor quality was caused by particulate matter that comes from, among other sources, idling cars.
“Idling vehicles put pollution into the air,” Kusiek said, and this talk is to discuss the consequences of that pollution.
“It’s actually not necessary to idle your vehicle for as long as you might think.”
Don’t be idle
Cars are a major source of air pollution in Alberta. As previously reported in The Gazette, when traffic on major St. Albert roads dropped about 45 per cent early in the 2020 pandemic, concentrations of nitrogen oxide (which cars release when they burn fuel) in the city plunged to their lowest level since the city’s air quality monitoring station started operations in 2016.
Car exhaust contains many pollutants, including nitrogen oxides (associated with acid rain), carbon monoxide (poisonous), and particulate matter (linked with heart and lung disease), said City of St. Albert environmental co-ordinator Payton Homeak, a speaker at Thursday’s talk.
St. Albert passed an anti-idling bylaw in 2008 to address this pollution, Homeak said. The law bans motorists from idling a non-mass-transportation vehicle in town for more than three minutes at a time. Anyone who does can be fined $100. The law does not apply if it is above 30 C or below -20 C, and makes exceptions for emergency vehicles, power take-off systems, armoured cars, and vehicles loading and unloading passengers.
Homeak said the city received 58 complaints under the idling bylaw in the last two years, but was not sure if anyone had been fined.
Unless you have a really old car with a carbureted engine, you don’t need to idle it, said Alberta Motor Association advocacy manager Dominic Schamuhn, a speaker at Thursday’s talk.
“The reality is, from a mechanical perspective, a modern engine needs only about 30 seconds to warm up,” he said.
Idling waste fuel, costs money, and cause pollution, Schamuhn said. Natural Resources Canada has found that idling for more than 10 seconds wastes more fuel and causes more pollution than turning your car off and on again, with more than 60 seconds of idling costing you more in fuel than it does in maintenance from starting and stopping the engine. Idling cars are also targets for theft, the AMA noted.
Canadians could keep about a megatonne of carbon dioxide out of the air each year if they avoided three minutes of idling a day, the City of St. Albert reports — equivalent to taking 340,000 cars off the road.
Canadadrives.ca reports that the best way to warm up a car is to drive it so the heat from the engine builds up in the cabin. Block heaters, heated seats, and parking indoors can also help.
Schamuhn said drivers can reduce pollution from their cars by driving less aggressively, keeping their tires properly inflated, and switching to hybrid or electric cars, the latter of which have zero tailpipe emissions.
Thursday’s talk runs from noon to 1 p.m. Visit capitalairshed.ca/news-events/webinars for details and, in a few days, a recording of the talk.
