Billboards beside busy roads and posters at petrol stations in the capital have begun to encourage motorists parked at the kerbside to switch off their engines.
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The four week advertising campaign to cut air pollution is called ‘Engine Off, Every Stop’ and is led by campaign group Idling Action London, the City of London Corporation and Camden Council. Posters reveal the volume of toxic fumes that can be emitted from just a single idling engine. As many as 36,000 people in the UK are thought to die prematurely from long term exposure to air pollution every year.
“Switching off when parked is one of the easiest ways to drive that number down,” said the City of London Corporation’s environmental services committee chairman Keith Bottomley. “This simple change is behaviour will make a real positive difference.”
London's Mayor Sadiq Khan described engine idling as “completely unnecessary” and a “threat to the health of anyone close by”.
The Transport Research Laboratory welcomed the Idling Action London campaign and called for it to be rolled out across the country. “We must act now to combat the spectre of air pollution from engine idling,” said TRL Academy director Richard Cuerden. It has found that if half of all cars in London sat idling at traffic lights for just one minute, nearly 30,000kg of carbon dioxide would be released into the atmosphere.
In other motoring news, the National Audit Office said the Government still has a long way to go to achieve its aim for almost all cars to emit zero carbon by 2050. According to its head Gareth Davies, meeting the target to phase out new petrol and diesel cars in less than a decade still requires “a major transition for consumers, car makers and those responsible for charging infrastructure”.
Parliament's Public Accounts Committee chair Meg Hillier added that the vast majority of charging points are currently for private off street parking, adding that not everyone has a driveway to charge their car. “Government must urgently develop a real plan if it wants electric cars to comprise 100% of new sales by 2035,” she said.
A Government spokesman said ultra low emission vehicles currently represent 11% of the new car market, adding it will set out a plan later this year on how it will deliver on phase out dates for new petrol and diesel vehicles.
(Photograph: City of London Corporation)
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