Anti-Smog Program Offers Hazy Idea of Dirty Cars : Environment: The profile of the state’s most-polluting vehicles continues to change. Critics also say the system lacks follow-up and enforcement procedures.
On a warm Wednesday in Fresno, a day when smog obscured the view of the nearby southern Sierra, three cars drove into a Highway Patrol roadblock and had their pollution levels tested by the state Bureau of Automotive Repair. Which was the cleanest?
* The 1985 Honda Accord driven by a housewife who considers herself an environmentalist, recycles bottles and cans and had her car tuned up just over a month ago?
* The 1974 Cadillac Coupe de Ville with torn upholstery, missing chrome, dust thick enough to write in, with a middle-aged man at the wheel?
* The 1985 Ford Bronco II with the leather-wrapped steering wheel, the good paint job and the young male driver?
It was not the Honda. Not the Bronco. Both spewed out enough hydrocarbons or carbon monoxide to break into the ranks of the “gross polluter”--that 10% of California cars accounting for an estimated 50% of the state’s vehicular pollution.
No, the creaky land boat--older than most college freshmen--passed the impromptu smog check with the highest marks. Edward A. VanMil, who runs the state’s annual roadside emissions testing program, was not surprised. Just because an automobile is old, ugly and high on miles, he said, it is not automatically a gross polluter.
In fact, the past several years have seen changes in the profile of the state’s most stubborn smog machines, confusion that stymies California’s troubled Smog Check program and calls into question the increasingly popular “cash-for-clunker” programs that pay drivers to turn in their old cars. Old, new, domestic, foreign--they can all be big polluters.
The Smog Check program has never succeeded in identifying the most polluting automobiles; the ones it has found have not necessarily been fixed or taken off the road. As two bills to revamp the program head toward their first legislative test this week, critics wonder whether even they are up to dealing with the elusive problem cars.
“There hasn’t been a strategy directed at gross polluters, no mandate to target this group of cars,” said Dennis Zane, executive director of the Coalition for Clean Air, a Venice-based environmental group. “That’s what we think one of the problems of Smog Check is: It hasn’t had that strategic focus.”
The backbone of such a strategy is enforcement, which does not exist today. Between biannual Smog Check screenings, many critics say, the state must run an ongoing, on-road monitoring program to root out big polluters. Once such cars are found, their drivers must be required to repair them.
Now, the only quality control for the Smog Check screenings is an annual random roadside survey, which runs two months and checks 2,000 to 4,000 vehicles. But even if VanMil discovers during one survey in Fresno that your car spews out many times the allowable amount of pollution, all he can do is mention it to you.
Proponents of a move to target the biggest polluters contend that getting the vehicles off the road will dramatically improve air quality statewide and allow less stringent emissions standards on factories and newer cars--important money-saving measures in hard economic times.
But others say zeroing in on the worst cars is not enough.
“Given that the air quality problem is so severe in Los Angeles, we have to go after all the cars,” said Tom Cackette, chief deputy executive officer of the California Air Resources Board. “If you go after just the gross polluting cars you end up with a cost-effective--but less effective--program.”
Little serious study has been done of cars that spew the most emissions into the air or of their drivers. Although random roadside testing shows about 15% of all cars checked have been tampered with--a conscious act usually designed to improve performance--most drivers of gross polluting vehicles do not necessarily know who they are.
“I believe that there’s a great number of folks who are well-meaning, concerned about the environment, who have no idea about the effect of their particular car on the environment when it’s not maintained or if there’s something wrong with it,” said Joseph Charney, assistant Los Angeles district attorney in charge of environmental crimes. “The consequences of his not fixing the car are that he’s polluting the air.”
Chris Handy, owner of the environmentally incorrect Ford Bronco II, fits Charney’s loose profile of the polluting driver. His car was so badly maintained that it spewed three times the allowable level of hydrocarbons into the air and nearly five times the allowable level of carbon monoxide.
Hydrocarbons are a prime ingredient in the formation of ozone, the main component of smog. Carbon monoxide aggravates heart and lung disease. Although air pollution regulators and activists quibble about defining the gross polluter, most agree that cars spewing around three or more times the allowable levels of emissions fall into the category. Most are caused by tampering or bad maintenance.
“I know there’s something that needs to get fixed,” Handy said of his Bronco II. “But I didn’t know it was a smog problem.”
Can Handy’s car be saved? Absolutely. Will it cost him? Yes. But the car is worth the $400 it will take to fix--unlike the vehicles once believed to have the most serious emissions problems.
As recently as two years ago, the Bureau of Automotive Repair, which runs the Smog Check program, contended that three-quarters of the state’s gross polluting vehicles were vintage 1979 or earlier.
At the time, cash-for-clunker programs were gaining popularity as a silver bullet to clean up the air, particularly in the Los Angeles Basin, home to the nation’s worst air quality. The South Coast Air Quality Management District had proposed a program to get 250,000 junkers off the road by 1996.
Last month, the district got its first application from a local corporation--Unocal--to junk 280 to 500 cars vintage 1981 and older under that scrap program, adopted just four months ago.
But between the proposal and the reality, the profile of the highest-emitting cars changed.
“We used to think the gross polluter was an older car, a beater, but some of those are classics that are kept up,” VanMil said. “Then we thought the gross polluter was in a lower income area, and we found out that was not necessarily the case. Then we thought that any domestic car had a better chance of being a gross polluter than any foreign car. But that’s another myth. We’ve gone through a lot of generations of thought.”
To be sure, older cars have not been exonerated entirely. If they lack modern emissions systems, they tend on average to be dirtier than newer cars. But when discussion switches from dirt ier to dirt iest , they are joined by great numbers of their newer compatriots.
One reason is newer cars, driven by computer-controlled engines and emissions systems, can go from clean to dirty overnight if a microchip fails. They are more expensive to fix--often more than the repair caps required by state law--so even if their problems are discovered, they may not be repaired.
Jeanie Lull’s 1985 Honda Accord is an early generation computer-controlled car. Lull was pulled over during the random roadside survey last month in Fresno and tested. While her car has been driven a lot of miles--150,000--it also had been tuned up in February, and the Lull family has continuously budgeted for repairs.
“It failed? “ she asked incredulously, as VanMil gave her the bad news that her car spewed out nearly three times the allowable level of hydrocarbons. “You’re kidding me.”
“I recycle,” Lull said later. “And I care about the ozone. I really do. I care that my family, my children, won’t have much of an environment. In this valley, it’s become more like L.A. every day.”
Douglas Lawson, an air pollution researcher in Nevada who formerly worked with the Air Resources Board, figures that the greatest number of gross polluting cars come from the 1979 to 1988 model years.
In addition, “because there are so many new cars as opposed to old cars . . . you get most of the pollution from cars that are less than 10 or 11 years old,” Lawson said.
In 1987, when Lawson was doing research for the ARB, the agency was among several that funded the first large-scale vehicle emissions study using field testing instead of computer modeling.
The study, conducted in the Sherman Way tunnel running underneath the Van Nuys Airport, began to call into question ARB assumptions about how much pollution cars put out, said Lawson, who managed the study.
In ensuing years, Lawson analyzed ARB data from random roadside testing and concluded that 10% of the cars created 50% to 60% of the pollution. “We found on the (Smog Check) test that most cars are clean,” he said. “Until then the belief was that people thought all cars emitted equally.”
By 1990, the remote sensor--which directs an infrared beam across a street to gauge carbon monoxide and hydrocarbon emissions--had gained favor in a small circle of air pollution researchers and activists. Using remote sensing data, Lawson found that the small number of really dirty cars “spanned all model years.”
In addition, the studies showed that many of the dirty cars had passed emissions tests and received Smog Check certificates necessary for registration. Often they were fixed just enough to pass the test and then returned to their normal polluting state.
But Smog Check has not targeted these gross polluters because “we have not been able to overcome the structural defects of the current Smog Check program,” Cackette said.
An ongoing, on-road monitoring program to identify them, along with sanctions to require drivers to fix their cars is the answer, the program’s critics say.
Smog Check is undergoing its fourth revamping in nine years. The two bills introduced in the Legislature face a hearing and vote in the Senate Transportation Committee on Tuesday.
The major bill, introduced by Sen. Robert Presley (D-Riverside), includes a pilot program to detect gross polluters, possibly using remote sensing technology. A competing bill would fine drivers $1,000 if they do not repair their gross polluters.
“Ultimately, the success of the (Smog Check) program will be determined by whether there’s sufficient enough enforcement to detect gross polluting vehicles and ensure that they are completely repaired,” said prosecutor Charney. “Otherwise it won’t work.”
