Newswise — You see them all over campus: cars and trucks left running while the driver waits inside. Maybe they’re picking someone up. Maybe they’re waiting for something. Either way, those vehicles are pumping pollutants and greenhouse gases into the air as students, employees and community members walk by.
That’s why Dalhousie University has prepared new anti-idling guidelines for vehicles operating on campus. They suggest that passenger-sized vehicles should be shut-down whenever idling periods are expected to exceed one minute; for larger vehicles, three minutes.
The guidelines have been approved by the university’s Parking and Security Committee as well as the Vice-President Finance and Administration, and will be promoted with the installation of “Idle-Free” signs across campus this fall - upwards of 20 in total. The first of these will be posted outside Dalplex, identified as one of Dalhousie’s idling “hot spots” by the Office of Sustainability last year.
“Last summer I spent most of my time researching ‘idle free,’” says Derek Robinson, a third-year community design student and staff member with the Office of Sustainability. “Myself and another student looked not only at policies and programs we could implement, but also did observations across campus.”
It doesn’t surprise Kathie Wheadon-Hore that Dalplex is one of the worst places for idling on campus. As the senior manager of facility operations for Dalhousie Athletics – as well as a representative on the Parking and Security Committee – she regularly sees cars parked waiting to pick up Dalplex patrons, lowering the air quality for people inside the building.
“Obviously we have a wide range of demographics coming in and out of Dalplex,” she says. “I don’t think people realize that the fumes from their engines go into the building, where people work and use our facilities. The more informed people are, the better decisions we hope they’ll make.”
The new anti-idling program is a partnership with DriveWiser, a fuel-efficiency program run through Clean Nova Scotia that provides drivers with information about driving, maintaining and buying for fuel efficiency. The goal is to help drivers learn how they can both save money and the environment.
“The average Canadian driver idles for six to eight minutes a day,” says Therese Bombardier, program officer with DriverWiser. "If every Canadian driver reduced their idling time by just three minutes a day, in one year we’d save 1.4 million tonnes of carbon dioxide and 630 million litres of fuel.”
RSS