Spluttering SUVs
This weekend, there have been a couple of ideas floated about how to combat pollution and free up the roads in Auckland.
First idea: Richard Simpson, the chair of Auckland City Council’s transport committee, is moving to prevent SUVs from getting into the central city. He tells NZPA:
SUVs do have a role to play in Kiwi life … But there is a land use issue in trying to get as many people as we can into the city safely, and these big vehicles lumbering around are taking up more space - they definitely are not vehicles for navigating around pedestrians in the central business district.
While Simpson should certainly be applauded for trying to come up with innovative solutions to the twin problems of pollution and transport management - even suggesting that parking spaces could be made smaller to stop SUVs from getting into them - his suggestions do raise troubling practical questions. Should a Mum carrying around her four young kids in an SUV be penalised just because some people drive around alone in the same vehicles for status symbol reasons?
You see, the problem isn’t really that there are some large vehicles on Auckland roads. The problem is that there are so many vehicles with empty seats going in and our of the city. A congestion charge based on the number of occupants in a vehicle (i.e. much more expensive if there’s only one or two bodies in a car than if there are four) would go some way to tackling that issue.
Second idea: the Auckland Regional Council is going to start testing 70,000 of the region’s worst-polluting vehicles next month against emission standards. Ultimately, those which fail these tests will have to improve or they’ll be taken off the road. Most of the worst vehicles are SUVs. ARC air quality engineer Dr Gerda Kuschel tells the Herald on Sunday (unavailable online) of the SUV obsession among city-dwellers:
Perhaps it’s something to do with the emasculation of men in their jobs that they must buy something that says ‘I hunt and fish’ even if they don’t. I understand that people need these for towing a boat or as an offroad vehicle but for commuter driving, to drop kids to and from school, I don’t like them. The emissions from all that stop and start action are just doing too much damage to the environment and people’s health.
Testing against emission standards is a welcome initiative. However, the issue of vehicles polluting our air is really one that needs to be tackled on a national level and at the source of the problem. As Jeanette has said:
What we need is strong financial incentives encouraging car importers to bring in more fuel-efficient cars into the country, and car buyers to choose these more environmentally-friendly vehicles…
The Government has the power to set efficiency standards for vehicles. This is best done by legislating for the average efficiency of all new cars brought in by each vehicle importer. This allows the market to meet that standard in whatever way it chooses.
Some importers may choose to sell only fuel-efficient cars. Others may make their worst gas-guzzlers more expensive and their most fuel-efficient cars cheaper, so their overall imports will meet this average standard. This would provide a market-led solution to the grave environmental problem of climate change.
