No Idling

It is that time of year when my home duties change. The summer honey-do list disappears from the refrigerator magnets and I have to take over all the little regular chores around the house as my wife returns to teaching. Being retired, I have the time to give my full attention to washing, cooking and cleaning as well as putting the gardens and ponds to rest for the season, winterizing the vehicles and ensuring that the bird feeders are restocked and ready for my winged friends. I have been thinking about changing the oil in the lawnmower before I put it away but . . . maybe next year.

I do not mind the cooking; in fact I am looking forward to making my first stew of the fall season. There is nothing the Breadwinner likes more than to come home after a hard day’s work than to have a hot meal served on plate with the food neatly and colourfully displayed. Over the years I have even learned to make a decent salad, getting the mix of olive oil and vinegar, garlic, basil or oregano and Dijon mustard just right. I admit to staying away from the deserts, preferring to treat us to a Jean Marc creation once in a while instead of repeating my sad attempts at an upside-down apple pandowdy that made a mess of the oven last year.

The laundry I can do, in fact I am known amongst my golfing friends as a faster ironer than my wife. Not that I brag much. But around the middle of May next spring I’ll throw in a coloured shirt with the whites so my wife will take over those duties for the summer. Make one mistake that turned the white underwear all pink and they never let you forget it.

I was only a week into the housekeeping routine when my wife found some dust that I had missed on top of the TV ( I think the free ions attracted it) and so earned a remark that I had no time to idle about when there was work to be done. Actually, I was trying to research the savings on gasoline by not idling your car at stop lights when she caught me at the computer. The theory is that you can save fuel and the environment by turning off your engine if you know that you are going to be stopped for a certain amount of time.

I know that the City vehicles are subject to a no-idling policy but there are so few of them and so many of us that it is time we all started thinking about new ways to save energy. The high cost of filling my car with 135.5 per litre of gasoline had nothing to do with my research.

Maybe it is now time for our local bureaucrats to start thinking in terms of the public consumption of energy as well as looking after their own (our) fleet. For the most part, our operators are paying attention to the no-idling policy, no doubt saving us some shekels on the tax bill as well as helping to reduce pollution. But the overall cost to the taxpayer should be their priority, not just the annual property tax bill that they send us.

I do not know about your city, but ours is plagued with four-way stops. Every time someone complained about traffic flow, the answer seemed to be to install four stop signs instead of two. The energy used to stop and start all these vehicles could be easily cut in half by removing these four-way stops. Sure, somebody is going to have to stop, look and wait, but not everyone. And if they do not, they can use their no-fault insurance.

Many of these four-way stops were installed for school children crossing the streets. The stop signs work 24 hours a day while the children cross only in four half-hour periods, at most. Yes, we may have saved on crossing guard salaries but I’m not convinced we increased safety. We surely increased the taxpayer’s cost of fuel and vehicle maintenance by forcing them to stop at a sign when no one, or even no traffic, is present.

Our city ‘saves’ money by installing traffic signals that work only on a timer, not on sensor pads that control the traffic flow based on demand. The money saved on the tax bill has more than moved over to the local gas stations as you can sit at a red light for minutes in the dead of night with no one around (except a lone police patrol car that is bound to appear the moment you try to sneak through the light). These ‘dumb’ traffic signals are costing us a fortune in wasted energy and time, a fortune that is hitting home more and more as fuel prices continue to climb. I will not even mention the frustration of non-synchronized lights on one-way streets.

Maybe some engineer with a slide rule down at city hall can calculate the savings or costs per citizen. Even our city buses sit and wait at these stops, burning diesel and belching out toxic fumes. But then maybe the bureaucrats are more concerned about keeping their annual departmental budgets in line than with the long-term benefits of good planning and the environment.

Perhaps our best hope is that some grade 8 student will take this up as a science fair project and pass along the findings to our politicians. After all, it is going to be their generation that pays for our sins of over-consumption and pollution.

I wonder how much fuel that Hummer or Ford Navigator consumes per minute. Probably not as much as that Mack truck with several tons of gravel in its hopper as it waits, idling, stopped at the red light at an empty intersection.