August 14, 2005
Smog Cops to Look for Emissions of Guilt
Sensors scattered along Southland roadways will monitor exhaust. The state will help pay to replace or repair fume-belching clunkers.
By Miguel Bustillo, Times Staff Writer
For anyone who has ever been stuck behind a car belching thick black plumes of pollution, Southern California's smog cops have a message that some will find reassuring: They will soon be scanning the streets for smoky clunkers.
In the largest experiment of its kind in California, the South Coast Air Quality Management District plans to use remote sensors and video cameras to measure air pollution from 1 million vehicles as they enter freeways and navigate roads in the counties of Los Angeles, Orange, San Bernardino and Riverside.
If caught, the owners of the most environmentally offensive cars and trucks would receive letters informing them that the government would pay to fix or scrap their vehicles. The South Coast district estimates that 10,000 to 20,000 of the dirtiest vehicles would be detected. Smog regulators lack the authority to order drivers to dump dirty cars, but they can offer incentives.
California officials estimate that the dirtiest 10% of all cars and trucks — mostly older vehicles — spew out roughly 50% of the state's smog-forming emissions from vehicles. By the end of this decade, three-fourths of emissions from vehicles will be from older cars and trucks, state officials estimate.
Studies have shown that scrapping high-polluting vehicles is among the most cost-effective ways of cleaning the air — far cheaper than additional controls on power plants and refineries. Yet politicians and state officials have failed for years to get the dirtiest cars off the streets.
"You can't meet our air quality goals without addressing this problem," said Victor Weisser, chairman of California's Inspection and Maintenance Review Committee, which oversees the state's smog-check program.
"We have made great strides with cleaner gasoline and new engines, but you can't make bigger reductions until you get some of these cars off the road," he said. "And unless we do something, these cars from the 1980s are going to be on the road a long time."
Smog regulators are expected to give formal approval to the program next month, and enough sensors to scan a million cars — one in 10 cars in Southern California — would begin work early next year.
Air officials, fearing that motorists with dirty cars would try to avoid the sensors, won't disclose where they will be, other than saying most will be along freeway ramps. Perhaps as few as a dozen would be required, because each one can scan thousands of vehicles a day, and they will be moved from place to place, officials said.
Past efforts to focus on the dirtiest cars and trucks have been stalled by political opposition. Some opponents have complained that poor families who can least afford new cars would be hurt most by any move to target high-polluting vehicles. Other opponents have raised concerns that sensors would invade people's privacy.
In an attempt to allay privacy concerns, air pollution officials plan to hire a nonprofit group to send the mailings and deal with vehicle owners. The information on whose cars turned up as high polluters will be maintained in a database separate from motorists' regular state records, officials said.
Even as local smog regulators are moving ahead with the remote-sensor idea, state air quality officials have doubts about it. Some have questioned the accuracy of remote-sensing equipment, fearing that it will finger the wrong drivers by mistake. Southern California air regulators, by contrast, say the technology, which is now being used in Texas and Maryland, has a good track record.
Some critics of California's smog-control tactics say the real reason the state has failed to address the problem of dirty, older cars is that doing so would require officials to acknowledge that the smog-check program is not working.
Ten million cars and trucks are tested every year in California to ensure that they do not emit excessive pollution. Cars built in 1976 or before are exempt, as are cars newer than six years old. All other cars must be tested every other year to have vehicle registrations renewed. In most cases, cars that fail must be repaired so they will pass inspection.
A 2001 report by the National Academy of Sciences found smog-check programs generally failed to deliver the predicted pollution reductions, though it noted that they had made a positive impact.
In California, an evaluation of the state program found that in 1999 it was achieving only 36% of the reductions state regulators had predicted. Changes have produced marked improvements, but the program is still falling short of expectations.
"Smog check is like trying to stop drunk driving by giving everyone a sobriety test once a year at the DMV," said Joel Schwartz, a former executive officer of the committee that oversees the smog-check program and now a visiting scholar with the American Enterprise Institute, a free-market think tank.
"We have known for at least 20 years that these inspection programs do not work particularly well," Schwartz said. "The evidence has been overwhelming that they are failing to repair the high-polluting cars. There is fraud. And yet they have been popular with regulators and activists."
The smog-check program has been plagued by fraud since its inception in 1984. In the last decade, state investigations have uncovered dozens of private smog-check stations engaged in "clean piping," a practice in which emissions from a cleaner vehicle are illegally used to substitute for one that could not pass the inspections. In many cases, investigators have found that smog station technicians charged extra money on the side without the knowledge of a shop's owners.
Outside reviews of the program, conducted by pulling over motorists after they have received smog checks, have also found evidence of what critics call the "clean for a day" problem: cars that have been rigged by technicians to get through the test, only to fall back into disrepair within days. |
