On cold mornings like these, a tiny cloud of guilt trailing me, I head out to the curb and start my wife’s car. She drops the kids at school on her way to work, so I scrape off the snow and ice and get the engine hot so the fan will be blowing warm air five minutes later when she’s ready to leave.
The cloud of guilt is because I know it’s not green to let an automobile engine idle.
The cloud is tiny because, come on, we have our household thermostats on timers to minimize the heating of empty rooms. We recycle. We don’t air-condition our first floor. It’s a small car and a short commute. In short, we have carbon credit to spend.
Up and down our Northwest Side street I see several other empty vehicles emitting telltale streams of exhaust. I lock the car with a spare key and go back inside.
What I did not know until this week: My guilt is literal.
To wit, Section 9-40-080 of the Chicago Municipal Code says “No person driving or in charge of a motor vehicle shall permit it to stand unattended without first stopping the engine and removing the ignition key.” The related parking ticket carries a $75 fine.
Who knew? Not me. Not Craig McNaughton, 35, of Burr Ridge, who told me that, Tuesday morning in the Loop, he used a remote starting device to start warming up his Nissan Maxima as he walked roughly half a block from a coffee shop.
A parking enforcement officer was writing him a ticket on 9-40-080 by the time he arrived.
But hang on. Just last weekend, during the Super Bowl, much of America was cooing over the Volkswagen commercial featuring a kid in a Darth Vader costume who thinks his magic powers started up the family VW, when, in fact, it was his father using a remote ignition device — a gizmo whose only practical use (aside from fooling children) is to adjust the temperature in your car before you get in it.
Was the car company trying to sell Chicagoans — and residents of the “31 states and dozens of municipalities (that) have enacted anti-idling laws” according to a 2009 report from the Environmental Defense Fund — an illegal product?
Not here: A 1998 amendment to the city code says the idling ban doesn’t apply to remotely started cars that can’t be put into gear without the ignition key — that would be nearly all of them — and that display “a decal or sticker indicating the presence of such a remote ignition start device.”
McNaughton said he plans to fight the ticket though he has no such sticker — who, until reading this obscure law, would even think to have one?
The remote-start exemption tells us that the prohibition has nothing to do with protecting the environment and everything to do with helping prevent auto theft.
Which is a concern. Sunday morning, in fact, a woman living four blocks east of us came out of her house to discover someone had stolen the car that she’d left locked and running by the curb just 10 minutes earlier.
Chicago police recovered the car undamaged just a few blocks away, but neither they nor the National Insurance Crime Bureau were able to tell me how common this sort of crime is. Similarly, city revenue officials had no estimate on the number of tickets written for violations of the idling ordinance.
What we do know, via AAA’s national director of auto repair John Nielsen, is that warming up your engine on a frosty morning is neither harmful to the car nor necessary for its smooth operation.
It’s simply a matter of comfort versus the tag team of conscience, crooks and the constabulary.
On behalf of my wife and kids I say, bring it on.
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