Imagine this:
You are walking down the street with a friend, and he falls down. Somehow he manages to cut his leg open on a piece of glass, and he is bleeding profusely. You immediately realize he needs to be rushed to a hospital, as the wound can only be closed with stitches. You have three options:
1. Do nothing. You can see the blood pouring out of your friend and you decided that it is beyond your control. The damage has been done, and any effort on your part will be to no avail. Tough luck, but he has another leg.
2. Call the ambulance. You know that the injury is well beyond your control, but you take comfort in knowing that you have made sure that the appropriate action will be taken to ensure the wound is completely healed.
3. Call the ambulance and put pressure on the wound while you wait. Common sense and basic first aid skills prompt you to act quickly to try to minimize the damage. Obviously your bloody t-shirt will not solve the problem, but it is too risky to do nothing while you’re waiting for the EMTs to arrive.
After reading that, you’ve surely decided which course of action you would take if it were you. This hypothetical situation was created for a dramatic analogy for air pollution.
The friend in the story is Earth, or Taiwan to be more specific. The “you,” of course, is you. The blood that is spewing uncontrollably is CO2 and all associated Greenhouse Gasses. First, let’s go back to the beginning:
Taiwan has a scooter problem. The motor vehicle density on the island is approaching 400 scooters/km2, which is higher than the human population density of countries like China, Japan, and India. A 1995 study estimates that more than 60% of the motor vehicles are motorcycles (1 out of every 3 Taiwan residents owns a motorcycle).
All of the above mentioned factors may lead to some other astounding facts that Taiwan wouldn’t boast about:
- While Taiwan’s population of 23,170,321 is only 49th biggest in the world (Australia is 50th!), Taiwan is ranked #20 in worldwide CO2 emissions.
- Taiwan’s CO2 output is 12.1 metric tons/person, which is 25th highest in the world (China is only 80th with 4.9 metric tons per person!).
That begs the question: Why are fewer people causing more pollution?
My answer is simple: People are uninformed. That is much different from saying “uneducated,” because according to a 2007 study, Taiwan ranks #1 and #2 in the world in Math and Science scores, respectively.
When I say “uninformed,” I mean it in the same way as when you were uninformed before you knew that Facebook was better than MySpace, or before you knew that Australia is the 50th most populated country in the world. Once you became informed of these things, in one case you most likely shrugged off the information, which will only be of use to you if you frequent Trivia night at the local pub. In the other case, I’d be willing to bet that you changed your daily habits, or at the very least, your internet habits. Not because you were uneducated before, but because you were uninformed.
Unfortunately there haven’t been any recent studies that rank how “uninformed” countries are around the world, so it would be impossible to say how Taiwan stacks up against competitors in that field. Consequently, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that we are all tied for #1. Except for Tuvalu, maybe. They know what’s going on.
Fortunately, if done correctly, it is very easy is inform a large group of people.
As part of the adaptation process that took place over the past few million years, humans and animals alike have developed a behavioral trait called “herd behavior.” Just as the term suggests, herd behavior is our natural and innate instinct to follow a crowd. It’s really easy to see why herd behavior stuck with us throughout the phases of evolution.
· A small pack of lionesses scare a herd of a thousand wildebeest. It’s impossible for all of the grazing animals to have seen the cause of danger, yet they all flee because they saw another one flee.
There are also many famous examples of herd behavior in humans, which include mass buying/selling of stocks after seeing a small trend, or even choosing a restaurant simply (and possibly subconsciously) because it has more customers. In all of these examples, the animals are operating under the innate assumption of "It's more likely that I'm wrong than that all those other people are wrong. Therefore, I will do as they do” (this is also the core concept for “information cascades,” which is a close relative to herd behavior. Example: If you see a line in front of the bathroom door, you don't check the door to see if it's locked. You wait with the herd because you assume those people aren't wrong).
Now imagine if I asked you to participate in an experiment which involved you sitting on a machine whose only function is to convert gasoline into CO2 and other poisonous additives. For the experiment, I would ask you to stand 20 meters away from an elementary school, and aim your CO2 machine at the front door for 3 minutes. Would you do it? (The appropriate and rational answer is “no.”)
What’s interesting is that although you probably wouldn’t do it by yourself, if you saw 20 other people sitting on CO2 machines and pumping poison into a school, you’d second guess your idea that this is somehow harmful. There’s a part of your brain that will tell you “These people can’t ALL be wrong. They must know some extra information that justifies polluting the youth.” Before you know it, you’re sitting on a CO2 machine with what’s now turned into 50 other people, backs and exhaust pipes facing the school.
The scenario I’m trying to recreate with this imaginary experiment is that of “voluntary idling.” Idling, when used in the context of motor vehicles, refers to the running of an engine when the vehicle is not in motion. “Voluntary” situations include idling while waiting in front of somebody’s house for them to come out, leaving the scooter running when you run into 7-Eleven for a coffee, or stopping to take a phone call (involuntary idling occurs when we are in stop-and-go traffic, waiting to make a left turn, etc).
As it turns out, a scooter can burn 0.15 liters of fuel every hour of engine idling time. That also means for every 60 minutes that your scooter is operating and not moving forward, you voluntarily pump around 5 kg of CO2 into the very air that we share (FYI- 1 liter of fuel produces 33 kg of CO2!).
Fortunately, we can use an information cascade to reverse this uninformed thinking. The environmental group Idle-Free Taipei is hoping to take advantage of herding behavior in humans to expedite the informing of scooter drivers. If a driver is idling at a traffic light and somebody pulls up next to him and immediately turns the engine off, the first driver will seriously consider doing it as well. The next person to do it will almost convince him, and a third non-idler will surely get him to think “they can’t ALL be wrong…” thus creating another carrier of information.
To shake off the myths about idling vs. engine re-starting, it’s been proven that restarting the engine a few extra times a day won’t cause any extra wear and tear on the system (a point that scooter mechanics agree on).
Additionally, there is a myth circulating that restarting an engine actually uses more fuel then letting the engine run. This is also false.
In a controlled study, a scooter (with a measured amount of fuel) idled for 25 minutes before running out of fuel. The same amount of fuel was added again, only this time, the scooter was turned off for 60 second intervals seven times throughout the experiment. The results showed every time that the fuel lasted much, MUCH longer than the 25 minutes in the original experiment.
The conclusion from all these facts points to the magic number being 10 seconds. It’s highly recommended (by scooter mechanics) that if know you are going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it becomes voluntary idling, and you should stop voluntarily polluting the air that will eventually find itself in your own lungs.
Fortunately, in Taipei, many traffic lights have countdown timers. The timers’ original purpose was to help reduce the amount of traffic accidents, but it is quickly finding itself useful for those who are already informed about the facts of voluntary idling. If the red light in front of you says anything more than “10,” or if the adjacent pedestrian crossing light is still counting down from “10,” all it takes is one hand to reach down and give your engine a rest. (By the way, one study suggests that scooters idle for almost 80 seconds for every 1 kilometer driven. That’s 80 more seconds of rest that your scooter deserves for operating under Taiwan’s extreme weather conditions).
By now you’re probably wondering what the point of this is. Driving a scooter causes more pollution than idling, so isn’t asking scooter drivers to not idle trying to solve the wrong problem? Will it even make a difference in the long run?
I’ll start with the second question- Will it make a difference?
The first is the short and easy answer: Yes. At a single intersection, in 90 seconds the cumulative idling time can be up to and over 80 minutes (during rush hours). That’s just in one scooter box. Depending on the intersection, the same thing is happening on the other side of the street, making it 160 minutes of idling time (.3 liters of fuel) in just 90 seconds. Now multiply that by the number of intersections in Taipei (here’s the equation: 160 idling minutes X a lot of intersections = a large number of minutes/fuel wasted in JUST 90 SECONDS). What’s worse is that as soon as one light turns green, another one turns red, and we start over again, repeat, repeat.
Basically, thousands of liters of fuel are used every day while scooters don’t even make a centimeter of forward progress (around 26,000 liters/day). In my humble opinion, eliminating 330,000 metric tons of CO2 emissions will indeed make a difference in Taiwan’s yearly CO2 output (291 million tons), not to mention the health and comfort of fellow scooter drivers waiting at stoplights. Back to the first question- isn’t an "anti-idling" campaign solving the wrong problem?
This is more complicated. In every scenario there are “bigger fish to fry,” so to speak. You could easily say that asking scooter drivers to idle less is like asking the school bully to hit you less hard. Wouldn’t the more ideal solution be to eliminate the protagonist altogether, i.e. the scooters and the bullies themselves?
There’s not really a need to answer that rhetorical question, because of course the ideal situation is a CO2-free environment. It would also be nice if money grew on trees and certain food didn’t make us gain weight. Unfortunately, scooters in Taiwan are a fact of life. No matter how cheap the bus is, no matter how many kilometers of MRT track is laid, there will always be scooters. Although the government is making a push towards electric scooters, there is no law in the foreseeable future to banish gas-operated vehicles.
This is where Idle-Free Taipei steps into the equation. As a population, we have organizations telling us left and right to “stop polluting” and “stop global warming.” There are environmental organizations everywhere either using general “don’t waste” advice, or coming up with an overwhelming laundry list of do’s and don’ts we can follow to improve our disgusting habits. We all know that the more things we have to do/don’t do, the less effort gets put into each task.
I agree with the goals and intentions of all these messages, but what I’ve noticed about human behavior is an extreme lack of response when being addressed as a crowd. That is to say, if someone got the rights to project an anti-pollution message on the Moon to ensure that it was seen worldwide, it would affect fewer people, not more. If we are operating under herd behavior conditions, the individual mentality turns to “drop in the bucket” thinking: “My small, immeasurable contribution will literally not affect the outcome, therefore this message does not apply to me, and I will leave it up to everyone else to take care of it.” That’s actually not far from the truth, but when that happens 8 billion times over, our bucket is void of any drops at all. You drop doesn’t make a difference; I can concede that point. But yours and mine together most certainly does.
Going back to the scenario with your friend whose leg is bleeding, which reaction did you choose? The first one was a drop-in-the-bucket response. If you can’t fix it right away, then what’s the point in trying, right?
Or were you the second friend, who recognized that there is hope, called the ambulance, but opted not to help in the meantime?
A particular environmental group has chosen not to publicly support Idle-Free Taipei because Idle-Free Taipei’s goal is to reduce pollution, not to eliminate it. Personally, I don’t think there is enough time for Taiwan to wait around for everyone to switch to electric scooters or take mass-transit.
Idle-Free Taipei is a duct-tape quick fix over a massive leak; we are putting pressure on the wound.
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