America’s 8 Billion Gallon, 40 Million Ton Annual Idling Epidemic of Parked Cars and Trucks

America’s epidemic of parked, idling cars and trucks is much bigger than we thought. So, we are adjusting our metric estimates upwards. Over the past three years, GoGreen Communications Inc. has often publicized the figure of 6 billion gallons of fuel generating 30 million tons of carbon emissions from idling cars and trucks across the United States. We’ve been wrong; our estimate has been too low.?

As a?published ‘expert’ ?in the U.S. regarding the idling metric in the transportation sector and communities at large, I’ve had a nagging feeling that this ‘6-billion-gallon’ figure has been out of date for some time. Not least of which why is that the problem has grown exponentially in the past 20 years.?

Based on what I can find, the?‘6 Billion gallon’ research ?was conducted by Argonne National Laboratory around 2005 (correct me if I’m wrong, Argonne). This was at a time when the U.S. had some 248 million registered cars and trucks, and the Canadian market had some 19 million registered vehicles for a total of 267 million.

Fast forward nearly 20 years to 2023 and registered cars and trucks in the U.S. now total 282 million with Canada at 26 million for a total of about 310 million registered vehicles today (the vast majority, about 97%, are still fossil-fuelled). By our estimate, the corresponding 6-billion-gallon figure we’ve been quoting should increase 16% by a further 960M gallons in the U.S. alone. Keep in mind, this is an estimate. But a well-educated guess.?

To make things simple let’s round up the 960M gallons to an even 1 billion gallons. Which means the previous 6 billion is now 7 billion gallons a year in the U.S. Meanwhile, the size of the Canadian market is about one-tenth that of the U.S. So, as an estimate of the idling problem in the Canadian market, what we’ve done in the past is take one-tenth of the figure of the U.S. number which equals .7 billion or 700 Million gallons.?

But hold on. The idling problem (or idling ‘epidemic’ as we prefer to call it), has grown much bigger than the 16% increase represented by vehicle registrations alone. In our opinion, this is largely thanks to the arrival of smartphones. Why? As I wrote in?an article earlier this year, it’s our conclusion that the idling problem has grown exponentially since 2010 along with smartphone usage. That’s right: the smartphone has dramatically driven up our unconscious ‘60’s idling’ behavior.?Here’s how and why.

The bottom line: thanks to our ever-increasing ‘zombie-like’ idling behavior in our parked cars and trucks, GoGreen’s estimate of the metrics surrounding the idling epidemic across North America means an added premium of at least another 1 billion gallons to the problem in the U.S. alone. So, the figure we’ll be quoting from now on is 8 billion gallons annually in the U.S., and another 800 million gallons in Canada for a total of 8.8 Billion gallons annually, for both countries. This equates to roughly 44 million tons of carbon above the previous 33 million tons we had been publicizing for both countries.?

Even these figures may be too low, thanks to the amount of screen time the average North American devotes to their smart phones. According to?Exploding Topics , almost half (46%) of Americans believe they spend an average of 4 to 5 hours on their smartphones each day. This pernicious habit is on display wherever one chooses to look; in parking lots, city streets, outside daycares, schools, and hospitals, etc., motorists transfixed by their phones while idling a parked vehicle.?

And yet, politicians and policy makers across the U.S. and Canada, by their silence on the issue, continue to promote the big fib that idling is ‘no big deal.’ It’s as if they are telling the public “we don’t account for it, and neither should you. Go ahead and idle, it’s no big deal.” The inference is somehow, like magic, we will decarbonize our transportation system while actively ignoring the epidemic of idling fossil-fuelled vehicles all around us.?

A prime example:?The North Carolina Deep Decarbonization Pathways Analysis . Nowhere in this analysis can we find a reference to idle reduction or conservation of fuel from the state’s 3.2 Million fossil-fuelled vehicles. The words ‘idle’ or idling’ are nowhere to be found.?

These days, one literally requires blinders not to see the line-up of idling vehicles outside our kids’ schools, fouling the air inside and outside schools from coast to coast. The generation of carbon emissions from idling is truly appalling; typical American and Canadian motorists adding 100, 200 and 300 engine hours of idle time because they believe in ‘60’s idling myths’ handed down from the carburetor age as social gospel – “idling is good,” “restarts are bad” and “long warmups are good.”?

Here’s the ’$64,000 question’. How long will politicians avoid the inevitable; policy makers must address 8.8 billion gallons going up in smoke and the 44 million tons of carbon and exhaust being generated by current 310 million registered vehicles on the road now. Most of these vehicles are going to be around for a long time yet during this ‘climate crisis.’?If there is a legitimate inventory of carbon inventories from transportation, this metric has to be accounted for.

If policymakers truly are serious about squeezing out as much carbon (not to mention exhaust pollution) in our transportation system as soon as possible they will have to address the fact that Americans and Canadians do not know how to properly idle manage a 21stCentury vehicle at home or at work. My goodness. Virtually all original equipment manufacturers like Ford and Chevy say,?“do not idle our technology!”

So, it’s simply a matter of time and a question of how long we are willing to continue to contaminate our air quality, endanger citizen’s health, while vaporizing business and family fuel budgets and adding millions of tons of carbon. Based on GoGreen research, we are doing this mostly because idle reduction and conservation aren't in vogue “sexy” vs. EVs and infrastructure spending. We've often heard "it just isn’t worth the political capital". Besides, idling when parked is the way we’ve always done it since the 60’s and 70’s.?

That's the political calculation in our estimation.

What do you think?

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Get our updated point of view (POV) paper. The typical North American fleet operations is spending +40% engine hours on driver idling behavior!

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? The White House United States Federal Government Michael Berube Kelly Speakes-Backman Margaret Smith Vanessa Grisko California Air Resources Board US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy | U.S. Department of Energy Mark Smith Sam Spofforth Michael Laughlin, PMP Transportation Energy Partners Peter Butler U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) U.S. Department of Transportation James Hove Charles Small Egan Smith, P.E. PTOE PTP Licerio (Jay) R. Paulo Couto, PMP ? Raffi Freedman-Gurspan CalEPA Edison Electric Institute Illinois Environmental Protection Agency Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) Government Fleet Expo & Conference (GFX) ACT Expo / ACT News Environmental Defense Fund Transportation Energy Institute ? The International Council on Clean Transportation Katharine Hayhoe Shelly Miller Sotirios Papathanasiou Jeffery Smith Tim Smedley Union of Concerned Scientists ? Clean Air in London Sacramento Metropolitan Air Quality Management District Gary A Bailey MONTEREY BAY UNIFIED AIR POLLUTION CONTROL DISTRICT Richard Stedman South Coast Air Quality Management District Kathryn Higgins Ben J. Benoit North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Brian Phillips, CPM ? Bay Area Air Quality Management District Arizona Department of Environmental Quality ADEQ Coalition for Clean Air Moms Clean Air Force ? American Lung Association ? Texas Commission on Environmental Quality ? South Coast Air Quality Management District Ian MacMillan