Port Townsend students present car-idling ban to city council

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Port Townsend High School students are asking the Port Townsend City Council to consider an idling ban for vehicles inside city limits.

Members of high school’s Students for Sustainability club delivered a presentation to the city council Monday, encouraging councilmembers to enact a prohibition.

Five students discussed the proposed ban during the council’s
May 16 business meeting, and pointed to the negative environmental effects left by carbon emissions at the local and global level.

The ban would prohibit idling of vehicles for more than three minutes, with a parking ticket given to offenders after one warning.

Exemptions to the ban would apply to city and emergency vehicles such as ambulances and police cars.

People living in their cars also would be excluded from the prohibition, as well as drivers who are idling for the health and safety of people inside the vehicle. There are also exemptions for extreme temperatures below 32 degrees or above 80 degrees.

Students for Sustainability members considered and modeled their proposition on idling bans already enacted by city governments in Salt Lake City, Utah and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Included in the students’ presentation were startling statistics. Thirty million tons of CO2 are emitted yearly from vehicle idling in the U.S., the club noted, with
12 million gallons of fuel wasted every day in America due to idling.

Approximately 80 percent of marine environment pollution comes from land-based emissions due to water dissolving CO2, and two minutes of idling is equivalent to driving a full mile in a vehicle on average.