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There’s a street I cross in the morning that becomes a clearway during commute hours. I take a grim satisfaction in watching the tow trucks take away yank tanks, because of course their humans believe the rules apply to everyone but them.
Under the Citizens Air Complaint Program, they can record idling trucks or buses, report them and keep 25% of any fines, which typically range from $350 to $600.
This seems pretty common sense.
I mean, bare minimum that’s over $80 per report. Even if you only get one per hour, that’s still fantastic money by most metrics. That’s like $14k per month, or ~$170k per year. And that’s just the bare minimum fine.
I wish there was something like this for reporting people parked in bike lanes.
The cops won’t ticket themselves.
best i can do is roll of removal-resistant “I PARK LIKE A FUCKING ASSHOLE” stickers
Best i can do is a trip to ireland where i go to republican bars and talk to every old dude i see, especialky if he’s missing a hand. #lifegoals
Fuck cars!
Wish we got a more complete understanding of the truckers’ side in this article - why is it so hard to turn off your engine instead of idling?
The guy quoted in the article says that some trucks need to operate their lift gates 15 or 20 times in a day. First of all, turn on your engine to operate the gate and then turn it off when you’re done… Secondly, if it is impacting business too much to take that extra time to turn the engine on and off, invest in an auxiliary power source to operate the lift gate.
Maybe I’m missing something?
Former trucker. If it’s hot or cold AF it sucks not having a or heat. If it’s a hot day, it’s way hotter on blacktop surrounded by hot engines.
It can be a pain to turn it on and off a bunch of times per day, I know it sounds minor, but when you’re trying to keep track of a bunch of things, making sure the right cargo comes off or on in the right order in the right way, hitting multiple docks or stops in quick succession. Trying to claim the space you need and trip plan (a lot of people don’t realize how difficult it can be to get a truck through a city, especially East Coast cities).
Then you get somewhere and hop out of your truck to check in, thinking it will take 30 seconds. Talk to whomever you may need to, clear obstacles and eyeball the space you need to get your trailer into. You’ll run into clueless, apathetic and just all around useless fucks at every corner. The sort of people that make glaciers seem on point. 30 seconds can turn into 30 minutes real quick.
It’s a tough gig, and having an army of mercenary profit driven people out there looking to make a buck off the guy delivering literally everything you need to survive that’s not air (and sometimes even that too) is kinda bullshit.
There’s a lot of externalizing of costs going on. The trucks are idling because the drivers are operating at the slimmest possible margin under the assumption that idling doesn’t cost anything.
What we actually would want to get to is that idling does have a cost (environmental, health, pleasantness of the area, etc). And that cost ought to be passed up the chain so that the various goods being shipped are more expensive.
But without a more centrally-managed economy, the implementation is to put all the pressure on the truck drivers and leave them responsible for passing that pressure to the next step up the chain. It doesn’t work out very well in practice because the drivers need to make a bunch of capital expenses for something like adding a cab AC and adding a batter-powered lift, but they’ve been operating at low margins so they’re not in a position to do it.
Local deliveries should be happening in electric vehicles. And 90% of long range trucks should have been a train. Go back in time a few decades and get the godless MBA having fucks out of the railroad industry.
Boom! Y’all should elect me king of everything, just solving problems left and right!
Local deliveries should be happening in electric vehicles.
Including cargo bikes, not only electric box trucks.
You don’t need a centrally managed economy, you just need ancient irish car maintenance wisdom.
Yeah that sucks, but that truck should be a train on a rail spur, and if we can punish anyone involved in making it not that, i am in favor.
There are also older and jankier trucks still around which need the engine running for things like the lights and/or the hydraulic loading gate in the back to operate. Both these things are non-negotiable safety needs when loading or unloading a truck.
My understanding is that turning off and on a diesel engine is not great for it or something like that. Sorry, my grandpa was a mechanic and I’m half remembering something he said.
Ya it’s more wear and tear. It was more true with older engines than newer ones. Newer trucks have a more complex starting mechanism that’s easier on the engine.
My grandpa drove a semi truck;
The A/C was part of it, some truck stops even had a thing called “IdleAir” that was like a window unit so you didn’t have to leave your engine running. For semis nobody wants to sleep in a sunbaked box with no air.
But according to him, for the really big engines, turning it off and on causes more wear and tear than leaving it running. So back in the day when diesel was still very cheap compared to gas they all got in the habit of leaving it on all the time.
Even the cops leave their cars on all the time where I am from.
Cops will leave their engines running because they may have to go into service at a moment notice. Not sure if I entirely agree the half second to fire up is going to slow their response considerably, but I’d error on the side of an exception for emergency equipment.
They don’t leave firetrucks running…
While I certainly agree with your overall point, I’d guess that firefighters have someone who’s job it is to start the engine/truck while their fellows are donning their gear.
Let’s be honest though; Push-to-start exists. There is zero reason they can afford all their SWAT bullshit and can’t afford to make a car that auto starts when whoever is carrying the fob gets in.
Not that turning a key takes any longer than pushing a button
Also, fire trucks don’t have a key to start. You set one knob to on and twist the starter knob.
If you’re loading and unloading 20 times a day, you’re doing local delivery and should probably be in an electric truck in the first place.
Sorry, but those don’t exist in any appreciable amount in the US, unfortunately.
I’ve often wondered why trucks can’t have a stop+start system integrated like many cars have these days. Wouldn’t need to be a conscious action to kill the engine, just something that happens automatically when they park up.
That is wear and tear on your engine, and the meager benefits you get from that are far offset by the maintenance costs.
For example, my not so fuel friendly car has, over the course of 3 years, shut itself off at stop lights for over an hour and a half.
Through doing this an entire gallon of fuel has been saved.
Over 3 years.
It’s engine down time is usually less than 10 seconds.
I get that it feels like this is a benefit if you have all of the cars everywhere doing it, but this ain’t it. Even environmentally, the extra batteries we need to produce will be more harmful than the miniscule exhaust will be.
Service trucks will put many, many more miles on them in that 3 years than I will. Their idle time might be a great deal more if they’re leaving it to idle while they go try to make a delivery. But, two things: those systems are ridiculously easy to turn off, by design, and diesel engines really don’t like working that way. The wear and tear would be worse, more expensive, and more harmful.
I’m not saying throw your hands up and give up. I an saying that the service vehicles are the ones we actually should be making exceptions for. Even in a consumer car free society, we’ll still need the service vehicles to do work.
If every car in the US had auto stop and drove similar to yours, it would have stopped 190,000,000 pounds of CO2 from going into the atmosphere in those 3 years.
Even environmentally, the extra batteries we need to produce will be more harmful than the miniscule exhaust will be.
Extra batteries aren’t required for Auto-stop. If battery wear was significantly faster due to the feature it wouldnt matter, batteries are much more recyclable than burnt gas.
I had auto-stop on my last car, and the battery made it 9 years before I finally had to replace it, and when the feature wasn’t working (too cold out) it made a noticeable impact on my fuel economy, around 3-5 mpg.
one gallon over 60,000 miles. My guy, that just isn’t the answer.
You’re also assuming that it’s only working at traffic lights. My auto stop would activate when the car was slowing down under 10mph. It also activates in car washes and when the car is parked.
But hey, fine, if saving 190 million pound of CO2 from entering the atmosphere buy turning off idling engines isn’t the answer, what would you do to save that much CO2 from running ICE vehicles instead?
You save 2 to 3 % on average and up to 7 % in pure city traffic.
Where are you that red lights are less than 10 seconds? Not many cars are going to get through a green light of below 10 seconds.
That just isn’t supported by real world data. Manufacturers may claim that but they make a lot of claims that only apply to factory testing conditions.
Real world testing comes to the same conversion. 10 % saving in pure city traffic can be expected.
Only stopping for 1.5 hours on red lights over 3 years makes you an super extreme outlier. Now you don’t specify the total distance in those 3 years, so perhaps you just don’t drive at all, but realistically people drive something like 10’000 km per year, average speed around 50 km/h, time spent driving about 30’000 km / 50 km/h = 600 h. To only get to 1.5 hours at red lights would mean 10 seconds per hour of driving. I hope that makes it clear how unrealistic YOUR number is.
Yeah I’m not thinking so much stopping at lights and in traffic for this application, but something like if the parking brake is engaged and 15-30 seconds pass, then engine turns off. As the trucker in this thread noted, sometimes they’ll hop out expecting a quick stop and it balloons into 15 minutes of idle waiting on other people. Then there’s the drivers who will let the truck idle while getting loaded/unloaded just for climate controls… And thinking at scale saving even just a gallon, multiplied across a whole fleet, could be a big impact.
Of course there’s more thought to put in for secondary systems, but just strikes me as something that should be considered.
Air conditioning
If true, he just fucked himself.
How could he not fuck himself, look at them tiddies.
I bet he isn’t the only one.
Can we get that for reporting cars parked in bus and tramway lanes?
And bike lanes.
$1, $5,$3, $7, $4 and $2!
Jokes aside, this is a pretty rad program.
Under the Citizens Air Complaint Program, they can record idling trucks or buses, report them and keep 25% of any fines, which typically range from $350 to $600.
Even if you aren’t doing it 6-9 hours a day like this guy is, getting a cool $75-$150 for making a report while out of the house anyway doesn’t sound bad at all.
Snitches get riches.
I’m cool with people snitching on someone pouring greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.
So am I. If I wasn’t, I’d have written “stitches” instead of “riches”.
This bounty hunterish thing is wild for me, I actually don’t know what to think about it. Good or bad?
Given it’s targeting businesses violating a city ordinance that’s in place to reduce pollution, I don’t see an issue with it. If it was people snitching on other citizens for minor violations or something, I’d be against it.
I guess the qualifier for me is, is the law something that’s in place for public good? If so, it should be enforced.
I guess the qualifier for me is, is the law something that’s in place for public good? If so, it should be enforced.
That’s supposed to be the case for every law.
Yes, but it’s also a pandoras box IMO.
Idling is illegal here often but I see vehicles doing it all the time. Would love if a scheme like this existed in the UK
It also depends if they want to enforce it.
A lot of things are illegal to do in the US but ignored, but someone has to actively enforce it. Which is a police problem on its own.
Every city should do this.
Not sure why the meter maids aren’t doing this instead of turning the people against each other
Where I grew up, meter checkers were getting threatened with assault for writing up parking tickets.
The current city I’m in, the meter checkers never leave their cars. They take a photo of the offense, and mail their tickets.
I guess some trucks need to idle their engine to keep the refrigerator running so food doesn’t spoil?
No, reefer trucks have an auxiliary engine powering the refrigerator.
Would that count as an idle engine for this program? I would think it would be exempt.
That’s not an idling engine if it’s actively working to keep product cool.
If a motor is performing a job task then by definition it’s not idle
Don’t wanna get reefer too cold unless you’re already done curing it…
well they’d better go catch it
