Human behaviour and cars

Whilst here in the UK, most people are prepared to complain about the cost of petrol, yet this morning I passed a queue of cars all waiting to enter a car park that was so full that each car at the entrance had to wait of a car to leave before it could enter. Being a small car park I guess even cars at the front of the queue would have to wait at least 3 minutes. The queue was at least 15 to 17 cars long. So cars at the end of the queue would be there for about say over 30 minutes. Yet all the cars were sitting there with their engines running. Sorry, but this sort of behaviour (consuming fuel as standstill) and complaining about fuel cost at the same time simply don’t equate. Are people just too lazy to turn a key, even if it saves money and the environment?

If you are in a queue that is moving every few mins then turning off your engine will do 3 things:

1) Increase wear to your engine (and really screw up the tappets on a V70 according to people here) as you are flushing unburnt fuel through the pistons and into the cat
2) Increase fuel consumption as it takes more fuel to start the car than to idle for a few mins
3) Damange the environment far more when you have just started your emisions are full of cr@p.

If you stop for 30 mins then fine, turn off the engine, but if you are in stop start traffic then you are doing the reverse of what you are actually attempting.

Stu

PS wow it replaces ##### with these things....

[sheerwater]

Here we have two problems which Governments cant solve. 1/ Pollution and 2/ how to treat tax paying motorists properly. I agree that sitting in a queue @ standstill is not fuel efficient but then again a road with speed humps causes cars to be in low gears, to slow down and accelarate again. The Government really doesnt give a damn about fuel consumption and fuel efficiency at all. I say this with some authority as My main subject at college 30 years ago discussed pollution,waste,etc. If actual fuel consumption was a priority Mr.Prescott would be running around in a Hyundai Atoz not a BL*!*** big jaguar. Secondly there is no attempt to limit the size of car engines and thirdly a diesel engine usses less resources per mile so where is the legislation to make every car diesel (we miss out lpg as though its cleaner it is no more efficient than petrol). While telling us to use public transport you only have to experience it once or twice to realise that the investment isnt there despite the road taxes that they screw you for. Back to sitting in the queue. If the engine is stopped you are parked. If parked our local legislation says a £60 fine. Cheaper to pollute. On the subject of pollution our beloved Government builds ever increasing empires of legislation and anyone in business will tell you that everyone from building inspectors inspecting the 1 million new rules to tax and VAT inspectors are rushing around implimenting more and more rules from bigger and better new buildings than everyone else has. Energy efficient buildings maybe but what about the energy to build them and the staff who travel to them etc.etc. That is not to mention the millions of miles covered every year by people tryiing to meet the new legislation. It does not take a genius to work out the next point. We have a post office with a large fleet of vans . It works fairly well. So what does the Govenment do? Issues licences to 4 more companies to compete with it. Result 1 post office fleet of vans plus another 4 fleets for other operators. Wow bonus time for the Government in extra fuel/tax/tax/tax/tax/ . Does the Governmennt think that we are all stupid ? Yes they do and that is the crux of it. I could go on for hours and hours but I will leave you with one point to ponder. Why are battery electric drills made in china so cheap? Because the cadmium processing in china is virtually unlegislated and therefore all we are doing is transfering pollution from our back yard. Funny how the Government is totally unconcerned with this and never tries to ban the importation. Cheers Nigel