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I’m going to deliberately put on my contentious shoes and clomp about a bit. Not something I do that frequently. I like to be considerate of others, and sometimes pursue that to it’s wooly conclusions and just get myself worked up to no good end. But I’m getting increasingly grumpy and, perhaps ever so slightly misanthropic as I get older (You can tell my birthday is looming). So one area that really irks me is unnecessary waste, especially when it affects others.

So, what’s the sign that petrol prices can go a whole lot higher without really hurting people’s pockets? Idling, that’s what. Walk through any car park – in particular a supermarket’s – and I’d put good money down to say you’ll find a lot of people (mainly men) sat in their cars, with the engines running presumably to keep them warm and/or the radio on.

It’s an extraordinarily selfish and unnecessary thing to do: Not only is it wasting a finite resource, it’s polluting the air around unnecessarily. Now, I’m not saying it’s not necessary sometimes to run an engine without moving. Being stuck in a traffic jam in freezing weather is a prime example. Defrosting a frozen over car before driving is sensible too, given the danger of not being able to see. But sat in a car, outside a supermarket, running the engine constantly when there are other options it’s warm inside, you’d be helping (ok, supermarkets are horrific places), and you’d save money from not running said engine.

It’s not purely car parks with bored husbands. White-van man is another offender (as well as invariably not wearing seat belts; Still at least it’s only something that’s likely to affect/kill them when they have an accident) no matter where they are. Sat outside the ‘job’ munching a takeaway meal. It’s the constant running of the engine, even after the car is warmed up, that irks me.

Council workers taking their coffee/tea/cigarette/raining break are particular ironic up here. Glasgow council last year introduced a £20 fine for illegal idling. So, if their own employees are ignoring the rule, I’ve little hope it’s going to be taken up by the wider public. I suppose you wonder who they’d fine? Although a council suing itself isn’t new.

An idling car or van runs at 1-2,000 RPM, which consumes a fair amount of petrol over time. At 85p a litre (or more), that adds up to a fair amount of cash. But as a proportion of take home pay, it’s clearly still cheap enough to fill a car that people don’t think it’s too expensive to run their engine when they’ve no need.

Until it is too expensive to do run a car for no good reason, perhaps there’s still plenty of room to increase fuel taxes.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 18th, 2007 at 3:09 pm and is filed under Glasgow, Personal, Politics, Rants, UK. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.