Study shows emissions testing program for trucks unnecessary: BCTA

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LANGLEY, B.C. — The B.C. Trucking Association (BCTA) says a mandatory AirCare-like emissions testing program for trucks would be wasteful and unnecessary, based on the results of a recent remote sensing study of truck emissions.

The study, entitled “Remote Sensing Device Trial for Monitoring Heavy-Duty Vehicle Emissions” and conducted in the Metro Vancouver area last summer and fall, concluded that most trucks tested are operating within the standards mandated for with their particular engine year, and that emissions from newer trucks reflect the increasingly stringent engine emissions standards that were introduced in the 1990s and tightened significantly in 2007 and again in 2010. The study was commissioned by Metro Vancouver in collaboration with the Fraser Valley Regional District, AirCare, Port Metro Vancouver and the B.C. ministries of Environment and Transportation and Infrastructure.

“The Metro Vancouver study confirms what we already knew,” said Louise Yako, BCTA president and CEO. “The diesel engine emissions standards introduced in 1994 and tightened further in 1998, 2004, 2007 and 2010 are yielding impressive results in terms of reduced air emissions from trucks with diesel engines.”

The BCTA estimates that model year 2007 and newer trucks currently account for 35% of the heavy-duty truck fleet across the province. The BCTA further estimates, based on a fleet replacement rate of 5.5% per year, that model year 2007 and newer trucks will make up more than half (52%) of all heavy-duty trucks in B.C. by 2015 and 63% of the fleet by 2017.

“A large-scale AirCare-like emissions testing program for trucks would impose unreasonable costs on the industry and produce very limited results,” added Yako, pointing to an emissions testing program for heavy-duty trucks in Ontario which has produced a failure rate of less than 4%. “As older trucks are retired and replaced with newer, cleaner trucks, diesel emissions will naturally decline over time, making an onerous and expensive testing program unnecessary.”

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  • If you have a regulation, and just one person gets around it then it is a waist of time, and the other 99%, their money being compliant. Either test for the emissions, or drop the whole thing.
    We have regulations on noise and they are not enforced, print the ones you are going to enforce and the ones you will not be enforcing in different colored ink so that everyone knows!
    Just a thought!

  • The first thing I wonder when reading this is if participation for each truck was mandatory, and were they informed of this one way or another? Or were they given ambiguous information implying they must participate?

    Yeah, bad trucks should be of the road. Given the burden of regulatory abuse in the industry this its a fair question. Shouldn’t the authorities play by the same rules they demand of us? How about it?