Turn off engines and give us all a chance to breathe

SEAN Birch describes the use of 4X4s as anti-social behaviour, (Letters, January 21) but one particular habit among all vehicle-users today is completely anti-social.
So much so there is a new call for a reduction in fines for minor parking offences in lieu of spot fines for motorists who cause unnecessary air pollution.
Switch Off When You’re Parked (SOWYP) hopes to tackle the prevailing problem of drivers who sit with their engines running indefinitely.
The fumes are concentrated at pavement level and do not disperse like those of moving vehicles. Perhaps you may have noticed this. It’s quite hard not to when the vehicle is a seven tonne van whose driver is on the phone for 15 minutes.
If you consider that same vehicle in an enclosed space, the fumes would be enough to haze Wembley Arena.
Walking up any high street one sees around half a dozen vehicles sitting in this way, polluting for no reason at all. The drivers are too insulated from the outside world to notice what they are doing, or that pedestrians are breathing in their thickly poisoned air.
The 0-5 age group bears the brunt of this. Exhaust pipes of today’s road machines are at child height. Research shows respiratory illness is on the rise among the very young, yet what are these drivers doing? And for no reason.
Please could Camden be the first to launch the SOWYP initiative? Frequent signs on lamp-posts would be a great start, but how about a slight overhaul of parking penalties?
Why not reduce amounts imposed for petty “offences” and substitute spot fines of, say, £20 for any private vehicle, £50 for a commercial diesel one, caught with an engine running for more than a minute? Isn’t there a case for reducing fines for being three inches outside a parking bay, for example, in lieu of fines for genuine offences which cause real bodily harm to everyone around, particularly children?
Please support SOWYP: we are keen to hear from anyone who might like to help. Would any film-makers be interested in making a commercial demonstrating how much smoke is emitted from an average vehicle over time, for example? Or would you like to write to a headteacher asking them to inform parents to switch off while waiting at school gates? Above all, anyone fed up with parking fines for little or no reason interested in appealing to the council to replace these is very welcome! Please contact us at sowyp@hotmail.co.uk
All SOWYP is asking is: could drivers please make one simple wrist action to twist a key to the left every time they park? Swipe that engine off, so everyone breathes (and the planet might stop heating up a bit too.)
S MacREYNOLDSON AND M HUGHES
Hornsey Lane, N6

Survival and the 4x4

IN response to the Sean Birch letter (Use of gas-guzzling 4x4s is simply anti-social behaviour, January 21), what happens if you choose to buy a 4x4?
You pay ridiculous amounts of insurance, you pay your road tax, then you fill it up with fuel, which is not cheap, but your choice, then you are free to drive it.
I don’t understand why some people assume if you own a 4x4 you have to fill it with people. What about seven-seat people carriers?
Don’t forget it was the good old 4x4 you refer to that during the recent snow, was the backbone for emergency survival for a lot of people around the country, as this was the only vehicle able to engage the winter weather because our local council was unable to deal with gritting the roads and side streets.
L WIGGETT
Denton Estate, NW1

A case for privilege?

SEAN Birch’s letter (January 21) has prompted a counter view which came to me as if in a vision.
While it is some way from my own opinion, it is a point of view that the silent majority of 4x4 owners (at least in some of the leafiest NW3 streets) perhaps needs to voice.
The prolonged bad weather has surely completely vindicated owners of large 4x4s.
Unlike the rest of local people who had to abandon cars or, worse, still rely on poor public transport or slippery pavements the 4x4 driver rides aloft through snowdrift and ice pack like a mighty warrior of old.
Yellow lines or narrow parking bays are no problem for the 4x4 since hard-packed snow obliterates their markings and a traffic warden is a rare site. And the careful mum can shepherd her offspring to and from school with no worry about collisions or troublesome pedestrians slipping.
Isn’t it time that politicians made privileged status for the 4x4 an election issue?
Preferential parking in Hampstead High Street should be a starter, avoiding the overcrowding on the impractical single-decker bus when a hard-pressed mum has to hop on a bus to get the youngest to pre-school in Fitzjohns Avenue.
I’m sure that it would be a vote-winner as well as the only sensible solution should we have another bad winter.
And the Heath car park, closed to lesser mortals during deep snow, could easily have accommodated the 4x4 driver, earning the City Corporation vital revenue.
NAME AND ADDRESS SUPPLIED, NW3