The Globe and Mail has an article today outlining a new smog alert system pilot project for the City of Toronto. I’ll admit that I’m not nearly as versed as I should be on climate change issues, but the proposal sounds like a good plan — except for one little detail.
When a smog alert reaches a certain level, Toronto’s Public Health department releases a warning to city residents. A “moderate” alert tells people that have high risk respiratory problems to restrict or reschedule their outdoor activities (for healthy folks there is “no need to modify outdoor activities”). But alerts for both “high” (“consider reducing or rescheduling strenuous outdoor activities”) and “very high” (“reduce or reschedule strenuous outdoor activities”) are missing two key instructions: do not drive during these alerts, and use transit or a bike instead.
As a city and a society, we seem to gloss over the real problems we face regarding climate change — telling folks to stay inside on smog days, instead of encouraging people to drive less, is like telling your friend it’s okay to eat ten veggie burgers when they’re on a diet.
The Board of Health can make this suggestion that residents restrict their driving habits, but they just choose not to — just like they seem to overlook promoting cycling as part of the City’s smog fighting plan. We know that if trips in the city under five kilometres were significantly reduced, both citizens and the city would be much healthier.
photo by Sam Javanrouh
24 comments
I second the motion!
I’ve always wondered why that was never part of the Smog Alert. Thanks for addressing that!
Any suggestion for cities like Mexico, where every trip is around fifteen kilometers long?
Greetings to all torontonians!
The city usually recommends to NOT ride your bike because strenuous out door activity is dangerous at high smog levels.
Wishing it don’t make it so. What about fines for anyone not car-pooling on smog days?
they should simply tell people not to drive when it’s above a certain temperature
i know the causes of photochemical smog are more complex than that, but it is an easy indicator for people to follow
Doesn’t the City tell people not to drive unless necessary in snow conditions?
Nice spin.
I think it ‘normalizes’ smog as a fact of life without effectively dealing with the issue.
As in: “What are you complaining about? We told you
not to go outside/exercize.”
Besdides, my lungs do a pretty good job of telling me when the air is terrible. They hurt.
More bikes please, Mr. Miller!
Maybe they could charge tolls in the highways and make public transit in the GTA free during smog days (the smog tolls could be a backdoor to introduce permanent tolls). They could also close streets for biking. Of course our leaders do not have a spine or the guts to stand up to the car addicts…
The greater problem is with the disconnect. Systems like this don’t force people to connect the fact that they’re driving to work with the air quality. Instead, they treat smog like some sort of natural phenomenon — like the weather, you prepare for a smog day by staying inside rather than limiting its intensity by not contributing to it.
Certain cities give a transit fare discount on smog days. Of course this is too progressive for the TTC to consider!
another funny/irritating contradiction: the anti-idling by-laws for cars do not apply when the temperature rises above a certain point (27 or something) because of the perceived need for air conditioning inside of cars in that kind of weather. this policy, naturally, contributes to more burned-up fuel and awfulness in our lungs on hot days. great idea, city of toronto!
to add another point, and i know this is a terribly unscientific observation, when i bike past a car in the summertime, i feel like i’m biking past a blast furnace. the operation of engines must have some impact on street-level temperatures, which must also have an impact on the bad behaviour of greenhouse gases. it’s just another reason to encourage the use of non-cars to get around on hot days.
another thing the city could do is to take steps to keep the urban forest alive. i know and am grateful that lots of time, effort and money goes into tree-planting. but why plant all those saplings in the sidewalks if their roots are encased in concrete and they consequently die off (check out spadina for examples)? i mean, in addition to being inherently pleasant, those trees are part of the environmental solution, right?
okay, enough griping, and back to work for me!
How about “local traffic only” on all residential streets? This would create clean-air corridors that would be safer for pedestrians and cyclists.
For example, Robinson st runs East-West from Gore Vale, (just east of trinity-bellwoods park) and goes to a few blocks east of Bathurst. This offers an excellent alternate route avoiding the smog and congestion of Queen St. If this and many similar fave routes were designated as two-way for cyclists with local car traffic only, the City could encourage cycling on smog days with a clean health conscience.
MLJ
Did we just get a smog alert TODAY? It’s May! It’s so ridiculous.
MLJ – nice idea, unless you happen to live on a major street.
Matt Blackett writes:
telling folks to stay inside on smog days, instead of encouraging people to drive less, is like telling your friend it’s okay to eat ten veggie burgers when they’re on a diet.
Um… hello? Bad analogy? Telling folks to stay inside on smog days is like telling your friend on a diet NOT TO EAT ANY BURGERS AT ALL, i.e. to stay away from what’s bad for your friend.
Matt Blackett writes:
But alerts for both “high†(â€Âconsider reducing or rescheduling strenuous outdoor activitiesâ€Â) and “very high†(â€Âreduce or reschedule strenuous outdoor activitiesâ€Â) are missing two key instructions: do not drive during these alerts, and use transit or a bike instead.
So let me get this straight: even though they’re suppose to reduce or reschedule strenuous outdoor activities, you want them to RIDE THEIR BICYCLES?
Can we think about this stuff a bit before we post it?
I thought about it and I think you’re thinking like Public Health — cover over the problem with a band-aid solution.
If you encourage people not to drive on a projected smog day (read the article in the Globe cuz the plan is to forecast 2 days in advance) the chance of it being a smog day could be decreased significantly. If you eat only one veggie burger, instead of 10, you will not gain weight.
Yes, it may fly in the face of your wisdom that we stay indoors on smog days, but there needs to be an effort from our governments to have people shift to transit or bikes on smog days. We shouldn’t be afraid of going outdoors, we should be changing the attitude of how the problem is created.
Sure not all of the smog is from the cars, a lot blows in from the States. But there’s a lot more we could be doing, including being vigourous about exploring part of the motion that led to the well-delayed city analysis of the implications of the Bloor bike lane – what smog-event bike priority measures could be set up to have a clean air corridor. While our progressives might well wish to forget about this – it’s maybe 18 months old now – an upcoming mtg of the Board of Health may actually have something on this on its agenda! and !
Ok maybe the presence of the subway means we have to make sure we don’t clutter up Bloor too much with bike lanes for the buses when the subway breaks down, but some of us think there’s a clear possibility to do something real for a clean air corridor in this term of office without a batch of new and/or costly studies that odds are, will find that cars are a big part of the problem.
We could try privatizing exhaust as a back-up plan.
Thickslab> Are you 10 years old? Can’t you disagree with somebody, or add to the debate, without saying “um…hello” and making whatever it is your saying hyperbolic and unreadable? This blogsite has so many good commentors (so unlike the internet!) but it’s like you’re representing them all at once.
Jenny’s being sort of heavy handed (play nice!) but thickslab, I’m not sure I understand your anger and capslockness.
I just caught the following on the CityNews panel of a ONESTOP screen:
“Things you can do to protect yourself from smog: reduce car use, stay indoors…” I can’t remember what the third thing was.
If we had a road tolling system, we could have this sliding scale where on a smog day, the price of driving goes up 50% and the price of a TTC token/ticket goes down 50% (limit one ticket/token per customer to avoid hoarding tokens).
Heck, we could probably start it right now with our municipal green P system. Jack the price of parking up on a smog day – or will that anger restaurant owners on King street?
How about a class action suit on behalf of all whose outdoor activities (biking, joggong, breathing) are affected?