Dan might be interested to know that things have changed a bit for truckers since his dad was on the road.
And not neccessarily for the better- before deregulation and union busting the typical Teamster truck driver shut off his truck, plugged in the engine heater if it was below freezing, and checked into a motel for a good night's rest on the company. Today's scab trucking companies won't pay for a motel and force drivers to live in their trucks for weeks at a time.
First of all, both diesel engine design and fuel formulation have improved a bit so that cold-starting is no longer so much of a problem.
The newer diesels with electronic controls are better starters, but still chancy on cold nights- our Postal fleet has seen many of it's 1991 vintage mechanical controlled engined trucks replaced with new 2004 Internationals with electronic controls, but we can't trust them to start when the temperature is below 15 degrees. Fortunately we have a heated garage to jam them into.
Secondly, while noise was the reported reason behind this, another good reason to stop idling is the air quality. Anyone who watched the news, read the newspaper or simply ventured outside in the past few days had to know that the air quality in the metro area was absolutely awful - reportedly the worst in 25 years. The chief contributor to that poor air quality was an accumulation of fine particles (known as PM 2.5) that built up under a temperature inversion. A major source of these particles is diesel engines. Since we cannot control the weather, we have to focus on what we can control, which is how much crap we spew into the air.
The 2007 standards for diesel trucks will bring those particulates down to similar levels to a natural gas fueled engine. Unfortunately since deregulation profit margins in the trucking industry are so thin that trucks are typically kept in service for 15-20 years. The effect of the cleaner engines will thusly be delayed considerably.
One thing that Dan and others might be interested to know is that more and more truck stops around the country are starting to feature Idle-Aire services (http://www.idleaire.com/) that allow truckers to have heat or AC and various other amenities without idling their trucks.
Idleaire is an alternative, but few trucking companies are buying it. There are other alternatives such as the diesel fuel fired auxiliary heaters, but they cost over $2000 so few trucking companies are buying them. So across Minneapolis and the whole northern tier truckers have no alternative but to idle engines overnight to keep warm.
While not yet available in Minneapolis, perhaps one thing Council might do instead of or in conjunction with an anti-idling ordinance is find somewhere to set something like this up for truckers to use when they stay overnight in Minneapolis. I'm pretty sure most truckers would jump at the opportunity to make use of such a service rather than waste several gallons of fuel from idling their trucks overnight.
Thanks Mark, for reminding our council that they have to provide some alternatives before they tell truckers to shut 'em off and freeze. Given that many truckers come from warmer areas of the country and aren't prepared for our subzero weather, some poor trucker could quite literally freeze to death some cold night if this poorly planned measure passes.
hanging on in Hawthorne,
Dyna Sluyter
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