Some Trucks and Buses Seem to Exhaust Air Quality

Dear Street Smart:

I recently paid for smog checks on our two cars, both of which passed with no problem. However, when I am driving the freeways I notice countless semitrucks spewing thick black exhaust into the air. This goes for school buses too. When will the EPA require these vehicles to contribute to air quality.

Michael Berbae Flowers

Capistrano Beach

Your question is very timely. The California Air Resources Board is scheduled to vote on a proposed emissions program for trucks and school buses later this week. If the program is approved, board spokesman Allan Hirsch said, buses and fleets of two-or-more trucks will be required to submit to annual emissions testing. In addition, he said, resources board inspectors will be dispatched to truck stops statewide to conduct random testing of heavy-duty vehicles suspected of unhealthful emissions.

“If the board approves this,” Hirsch said, “we will be going around the state looking for trucks that appear to be smoking excessively.”

Owners of vehicles violating emissions standards would have to fix the problem and could receive a citation.

Such inspections, Hirsch said, were conducted from 1991 to 1993 but were discontinued because resources board staffers got “diverted to other matters.”

If the board approves the testing, it is expected to be phased in next year.

sg,1

Dear Street Smart:

Why must students in the Rowland Heights School District, especially those attending Nogales High School, pay $300 for driver’s education? Is this a common practice in California? When I lived in Ohio, I never heard of this amount having to be paid to teach our youngsters safe driving habits.

Roberta Weiss

Laguna Hills

The state funded driver education in public schools until 1990 when then-Gov. George Deukmejian vetoed the practice. His argument was that teaching kids to drive ought to be the responsibility of their parents. The governor’s action was unsuccessfully challenged in the courts.

One result, according to Robert Cervantes who oversees driver education for the state Department of Education, is that well over half of the state’s 800 high schools have eliminated the behind-the-wheel portion of their driver-education programs. They still offer the free classroom instruction required by law.

Other schools, including Nogales, have hired private driving academies to offer behind-the-wheel training to students, each of whom is charged $150 to $300. “We do find that it’s often a problem for parents to cough up the money,” Cervantes said. “Hardly a day goes by that I don’t get a complaint.”

Dear Street Smart:

Please see if you can help me get to the truth about obtaining the required California engine smog certificate for my car. I am in the midst of replacing my old four-cylinder engine (which was unrepairable) with a V8 engine of the same model year that came with all the factory smog devices. Both my car and the engine are 1982 vintage. Due to engine compartment limitations, I may be forced to omit one of the smog devices (a valve at the end of the engine exhaust manifold) but anticipate passing the smog test even better than factory 1982 standards because I intend to install two catalytic converters.

My friend says it doesn’t matter how clean the engine runs. They won’t pass it due to “visual” or non-factory modifications. My question is this: Is it not the goal of the state to see that the vehicles on the road run clean and not penalize owners whose engine hardware is altered, even though those alterations result in compliance or better?

Michael Hodges

Trabuco Canyon

Your friend is right--the state generally will not certify emission control systems in which various components have been “mixed and matched” as you are contemplating doing. There are some exceptions, however, according to Paula David, a spokeswoman for the California Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees the smog-check program. She suggests you call the department at (800) 952-5210 and ask for someone in the smog check operations department to find out if your plan qualifies.

The main reason the state discourages mixing and matching, David said, is to promote consistency and avoid confusion. “You can mix and match millions of configurations,” she said, “but just for the sake of keeping our program flowing, you’ve got to have some kind of guidelines.”

Among other things, she said, the goal is consumer protection. “Although you may assume that your [modified] vehicle is going to be cleaner,” David said, “it may or may not be. We want to make sure that people don’t spend money that they don’t have to and end up with cars that aren’t cleaner anyway.”

Street Smart appears Mondays in The Times Orange County Edition. Readers are invited to submit comments and questions about traffic, commuting and what makes it difficult to get around in Orange County. Include simple sketches if helpful. Letters may be published in upcoming columns. Please write to David Haldane, c/o Street Smart, The Times Orange County Edition, P.O. Box 2008, Costa Mesa, CA 92626, send faxes to (714) 966-7711 or e-mail him at David.Haldane@latimes.com Include your full name, address and day and evening phone numbers. Letters may be edited, and no anonymous letters will be accepted.