Idlers

The Climate Change Steering Committee of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments (MCOG) recommends fines for vehicles that keep their engines running without moving for more than five minutes, according to the Examiner. The panel recommends exceptions for fire, police, ambulances, and vehicles stuck in traffic jams.

The MCOG panel recommends enforcement of such regulations, which is admirable, since the District of Columbia already has such regulations but doesn’t seem to enforce them.

The District of Columbia has an Excessive Engine Idling penalty of $500 under Title 2O of the District of Columbia Municipal Regulations sections (20 DCMR 900.1) and 18 DCMR 2601.2. Once a company is convicted of a violation, the fine on subsequent idling tickets is double the amount of the previous fine. There seems to be a per-occurance penalty cap of $5000.

The DC Department of Health Environmental’s Health Administration Air Quality Division has a Compliance and Enforcement Branch. Among targets: “The primary offenders of the engine idling regulations in the District are tour buses, construction trucks, taxi cabs, and solid waste transfer trucks.” It is unclear how many DOH air quality inspectors there are, or whether Metropolitan Police enforce this civil law. I’ve inquired.

The initial excessive idling period in the DC law was three minutes, revised to five minutes, and temporarily extended to 20 minutes during a heat emergency. Perhaps confusion over this standard accounts for the falling-off in DC idling citations.

There are approximately a gazillion charter and tour buses in Washington at any given time. Nobody knows exactly how many. Anyone who lives near a tourist attraction knows that half of these buses are violating the five-minute law at any given time, a finding confirmed by a field study conducted for the federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The EPA study posits that the DC idling regulations are not enforced because buses are often spewing their greenhouse gases and particulates near federal sites not patrolled by the DC Government, but the feds should be ticketing anyway, since EPA has similar regulations. Perhaps the local chapter of the American Lung Association can get the D.C. law amended so citizen “bounty hunters” can pop the idlers. Several of my neighbors with emphysema would be glad to wheel their oxygen tanks up to idling buses and hand the drivers a ticket.

My hypothesis is that after the initial bunch of tour buses got tickets, DC inspectors were “warned off” by officials due to complaints from tourist industry lobbyists. Tourism is the Divine Bovine of DC, even though most tour groups today stay at hotels outside the District and pay no sales tax because they buy things at Smithsonian Shops. It doesn’t matter; mutter “Bad for tourism” and you can stall and stymie our government and flout our laws.

Since tourists and their charter buses are increasingly concentrating in the rebuilt Crystal City area, perhaps MCOG will be more successful getting excessive idling laws enforced on the Virginia side of the Potomac.

 Image by Mike Licht.