By John T. Boal
Like it or not, we created and perfected the art of idling in our cars here in Southern California. And are we ever paying for it!
In the late 1940s, entrepreneur Harry Snyder brought his burgers right up to the windows of our fathers’ Buicks and, voila, the drive-through restaurant industry had its first born with In-N-Out-Burger. While it created a new industry, it also created an immediate acceptance of idling in our cars as we waited our turns to wrap our hands around a Double-Double. Ah, such innocence for this great, new convenience.
Since then, we’ve become Queues ‘R’ Us as, today, we take idling as an accepted form of self-inflicted suffering.
We idle our way in and out of Dodger Stadium, the Coliseum and other sports venues. We idle as we wait for green lights at stoplights and at freeway on-ramps, then idle in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the freeways. We idle as we wait on poky pedestrians crossing the street, a parking spot to open up or picking up our kids at school. We idle endlessly while trying to turn left on a surface street. And we idle anywhere from two to six minutes at the estimated 4,500 drive-through businesses in Southern California.
Although drive times are down minimally from the high cost of gas and the economy, idling still adds up. The California Energy Commission says we average seven and a half minutes of idling in our cars per day.
For the sake of not dawdling on this seemingly conservative number, that’s about 53 minutes of stoppage per week in our cars totaling 46 hours of idling a year.
Factor in crawling through Caltrans work zones, rubbernecking at the paparazzi patrol in front of the Ivy and other celebrity hives, and the general absentmindedness of an Attention Deficit Disorder society that regularly forgets a green light means “Go,” let’s round it off to 50 hours a year chillin’ in our cars.
Burning money
The generally accepted rule of idle is that one hour in our car consumes one gallon of gas. With 50 hours of idling consuming 50 gallons at $4 per gallon, that’s $200 a year burned while we stew motionlessly and spew fumes.
With 9.5 million vehicles registered in Southern California, let’s do a little more math. That’s 475 million gallons of gas going up in waste while idling. That’s a staggering $1.9 billion we pay to get zero miles per gallon while we sit in a twit.
Then there’s the concomitant cost of 20 pounds of CO2 emitted from every gallon of gas. With 475 million gallons idling away, we’re also tossing up 9.5 billion pounds of CO2 from all those stops-and-starts, and idling in line for our burgers, burritos and baseball. This further contributes to global warming as well as a gumbo of airborne trauma such as asthma, allergies, cancer, lung and heart disease, and respiratory illnesses.
On the clean ledger, hybrid car and SUV owners, whose batteries kick in when the gas engine shuts down while idling, reap another benefit of not only saving $200 a year by not wasting gas, but also by not contributing any CO2 during a stop. While we all can’t own hybrids or clean CNG vehicles, other private and government entities have not been lazy on this idling issue.
In 2004, United Parcel Service announced its drivers would start using computerized routes where they would avoid making left turns to not idle their big brown trucks while waiting for oncoming traffic to pass. According to UPS, this policy is now saving 3 million gallons of gas per year.
However, transportation bloggers have regularly spotted big brown trucks making left turns. Yet that objection should not dismiss this innovation, and how much could be saved if more delivery trucks abandoned their left-turn signals and just made right turns to arrive at their destinations?
Most states have taken a step in this direction. As one of 42 states that has enacted anti-idling laws aimed at large trucks and commercial vehicles, California legislation that took effect on Jan. 1 says trucks are not permitted to idle for more than 5 minutes in an hour.
Then there are the Canadians who moved the issue of idling in passenger cars from awareness to compliance. A number of our northern neighbor cities have enacted anti-idling bylaws. According to the Stayner Sun, “The City of Hamilton asked Green Venture to get the city ready for its anti-idling bylaw. Signs and displays were set up at many schools and events, and even 22 clean-air ambassadors were sent out on the streets!”
Too far, eh? Yet as Southern Californians continue to cough up money and pollution from fuming in our cars, maybe it’s time to at least more carefully consider our discretionary driving and purchasing habits, as well as plan our routes as UPS tries to do.
In the meantime, we don’t need a bylaw to remind us that idling is a curse for our purse and our planet, and gets us nowhere fast.
John T. Boal is the western region managing director of a New York-based non-profit and was a co-author of “Chicken Soup for the Volunteer’s Soul.” He lives in Burbank.
