Cleveland Wants You to Stop Idling (and Using) Your Car As Much As Possible

Attention DoorDash drivers, construction workers, parents in the school pickup line, and those stuck in deep highway traffic: stop idling your car engines when you don’t need to be idling your car engines.

This is the message from Cleveland’s Department of Public Health in its latest citywide ad campaign, seen on a dozen billboards. Those ordering Clevelanders to turn off their cars and put them in park when they’re not being used.

All for a trio of perks: “Breathe cleaner air. Save gas. Avoid fines,” the billboards read.

Public Health chief Dave Margolius is obviously most concerned with the first, minding that his department has been backing two legislative updates to both the city’s air quality code and its idling laws in the past few years.

But pushing further regulations on, say, local steel companies and their vehicle fleets may not be enough, Margolius believes. Everyday Clevelanders, he said, have to understand that they too must practice responsible car usage if the air around us is to improve.

“There’s a myth that it takes more gas to start your car than to leave it running. And that’s a myth. It is false,” he said. “We’re encouraging people, if you’re staying still, turn off your car.”

“Turn off your engine,” he said. “It will save gas and it will save our lungs.”

Local emissions inventories, like those kept by Margolius’ department, posit that close to 40 percent of Cleveland’s air pollution stems from what comes out of a vehicle’s exhaust pipe. (About 30 percent on average nationwide.) Emissions are higher in the car-dense places you’d expect: on highways, docking bays, hospitals and schools.

What this has meant to the Bibb administration is focusing on how to back non-car forms of transportation while promoting healthier ways of using vehicles where vehicles must still be used. Whether that be pushing 50 miles of new bike lanes, building new greenways, or riding the 15-minute city urban philosophy train.

The city currently has an Idle Reduction law on its books—Clevelanders can’t idle their car for more than five minutes without accruing fines—but prosecution is low and hard to pin down. And plenty of vehicles are exempt: cops, ambulances, armored trucks and city vehicles among them.

What Margolius hopes Public Health’s campaign does is nudge a culture of minimizing car usage when possible. After all, seven out of 10 Clevelanders use a car to commute to work daily, according to Census data. Eliminating all driving would be nearly impossible, he acknowledged.

Just as it would be to write up tickets for every driver who violates the city’s idling ordinance. (Or issue a minor misdemeanor for third violations, as the law requires.) One would think today’s high gas prices, which keep on rising, would be enough of an incentive.

“Not to play our hands to everyone who wants to violate this law,” Margolius said, cheekily. “But it’s not so much that we’re going to come out and we’re going to get you for this.”

“We just want to community to step up and turn off their engines as often as possible.”