I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Certainly, if you have evidence of murder or something, please do report it.
But for an idling vehicle?
Note that these laws are only targeting idling while parked, rather than during normal use, such as at a traffic light. This is called "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling.
Has anybody considered how much CO2 or other greenhouse gases are actually released by "true-idling" or "long-duration" idling vehicles, either individually or in aggregate? I spent a few minutes researching it with an LLM and couldn't come up with much. Most of the information and numbers I got were for ALL idling, including during normal driving like at a traffic light. My guess based on that is that it (true idling) is a trivially small amount of CO2 compared to the overall.
But it's plenty to earn yourself a nice payoff at the expense of your hard working delivery driver!
I think the intent is less about the CO2 emissions as about the air quality that people have to breathe (hence a stricter standard in some locations).
I don’t know about measurable effects but I hate when I pass a long-idling truck and can taste it in the air.
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> I feel it's Orwellian, or Stalin-esq to have us being paid off to snitch on each other.
Sure, but it's a different kind of dystopia to have commercial vehicles idling and fouling the air outside of normal driving. As described where you have to capture 3 minutes of idling (1 minute near schools) and assuming most people take a while to notice, rather than starting the timer immediately when the vehicle stops, it seems like a reasonable way to enhance compliance.
Idling while parked may not be a large contribution to total emissions, but it's harder to justify than idling in normal operation, and easier to enforce against, so there you go. Sometimes refrigerated transport more or less needs to idle to keep the contents at temperature, not sure if there's exceptions for that or if they just need to retrofit with more insulation or batteries to run the compressor or etc in order to comply.
Idling at lights probably gets reduced by auto start/stop in new vehicles as well as congestion charges reducing traffic and probably dwell time at lights. Auto start/stop isn't a universally loved thing; it makes some cars really frustrating to use, but when done well, it seems like a reasonable tradeoff to reduce unneccesary emissions.