Test sites bring car pollution levels into the open

By SIMON COLLINS

Aucklanders on some roads will be able to find out instantly from tomorrow whether their cars are puffing out too much smoke.

In the latest stage of its anti-pollution campaign, the Auckland Regional Council has teamed up with the National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research to install electronic noticeboards at 14 test sites next month.

The $100,000 testing programme comes a month before Cabinet ministers are to consider "recommendations for action" on regulating car emissions.

The 14 sites - two in each of the seven local body areas from Rodney to Franklin - will be single-lane roads such as motorway on-ramps where traffic is light enough to measure each car separately.

Laser beams will be set up to measure emissions.

Fifty metres down the road, electronic noticeboards will tell motorists whether their emissions were good, fair or poor.

ARC air quality manager Kevin Mahon said the tests would provide the first large-scale picture of car pollution levels in New Zealand.

"The numberplate will be photographed, and from that we'll be able to get the make and model and age of the vehicle," he said.

The Parliamentary Commissioner for the Environment, Dr Morgan Williams, told the annual conference of Engineers for Social Responsibility in Hamilton on Saturday that New Zealand was now the only country in the 30-nation Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development that did not regulate car exhaust emissions.

"We have no air standards, no fuel standards, no emission standards," he said.

"We are right out on our own. Every other OECD country has emission standards for cars.

"We are still mucking around about how we measure them and can people afford it with their warrants of fitness. It's painful."

Dr Williams said ministers were realising that they could no longer leave things to the market.

"The tide is changing. There is plenty of evidence of that," he said.

"You will see it coming out of the Ministry for the Environment. The new chief executive, Barry Carbon, has come out of an environmental protection agency background in Australia and he is going to put in standards as fast as he can get them through the system."

The Deputy Secretary of Transport, Roger Toleman, said an officials' report to ministers in a month would set out "options and recommendations for action" on car emissions.

"Last year the ministry commissioned a report, the Health Effects Report, which measured how much damage we are doing and said we are shortening the lives of 400 people a year."

Out on our own

* California introduced car emission standards in 1968.

* The European Union's latest emission standards, Euro 3, came into force in 1998, and Euro 4 is to take effect in 2005.

* Many Asian countries are now introducing controls. Thailand has implemented Euro 2 and is adopting Euro 3.

* New Zealand is now the only OECD country with no controls on emissions of carbon monoxide or nitrogen dioxide from cars.

* New Zealand does fine motorists if their cars emit a continuous stream of visible smoke for 10 seconds or more, endangering the visibility of other drivers.

* The Government also passed regulations last year to phase in lower sulphur levels in diesel over the next three years, forcing the Marsden Pt oil refinery into a $150 million upgrade.

* The Ministry of Transport estimates that 436 Aucklanders die prematurely every year because of air pollution, including 253 from vehicle pollution.