We’re disappointed that the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment seems to have grown skeptical of the potential of on-the-road emissions testing to replace traditional centralized testing centers.
A little more than three years ago, air quality officials were practically rhapsodic regarding RapidScreen’s potential to save motorists from a trip to a testing center. “This is the next generation of emissions testing,” a top Health Department official declared in a Denver Post article.
Meanwhile, a Regional Air Quality Council official praised RapidScreen as “very effective at identifying these high-emitting vehicles.”
But as The Denver Post’s Chuck Plunkett outlined in a recent article, the health department has failed to follow a 2006 legislative prompting to scrap centralized testing, citing what officials now maintain is the unreliability of remote sensing — at least in identifying high emitters.
Meanwhile, a University of Denver researcher who helped develop the on-road technology insists that its results are no more variable than those from stationary testing.
We’re not prepared to take sides in this highly technical debate. However, if centralized testing is not going away, we hope a growing number of motorists still can be spared its inconvenience.
After all, the vast majority of drivers operate vehicles that are not and never will be significant polluters. And yet a large majority of them still traipse into a testing center every two years rather than be relieved of the chore by driving twice by a RapidScreen sensor.
In 2010, Plunkett reports, 690,000 vehicles were tested on stationary equipment in metro Denver as opposed to 200,000 cars that were given a pass by RapidScreen. We would hope the figure for clean-screened vehicles could be expanded.
In fairness, we should point out that a report prepared for the Colorado state auditor in 2009 by an expert consultant supports the state’s current opinion regarding remote sensors, concluding that they are “not an effective tool for identifying vehicles with high emissions.” Interestingly, however, that same report raised questions about whether any kind of emissions testing makes sense in the long term.
As the report noted, “Ozone reductions provided by the AIR Program are relatively small in relation to the total levels of ozone concentration in the area and may be more expensive than some other air pollution control strategies.” Meanwhile, it added, “As vehicles become cleaner due to manufacturing standards, the potential impact of AIR program on the Denver Metropolitan Area’s ozone levels in the future may be limited.”
Still, don’t hold your breath waiting for an end to emissions testing. The Environmental Protection Agency is poised to tighten the ozone standard, currently set at 0.075 parts per million, even further this year, with the possibility that it will be pushed down to as low as 0.060 ppm. In metro Denver, such a standard would be “close to background” levels of ozone, an air quality official told us last year, meaning compliance would be virtually impossible.
We hope EPA chooses a standard that provides a more realistic objective. Otherwise, air-quality officials may feel obliged to impose regulations that will make centralized testing seem attractive by comparison.
