City to enforce emission tests on all vehicles
JAKARTA (JP): Owners wanting to renew number plate registrations in Jakarta will soon have to put their vehicles through emission tests.
The policy comes in a bill the Jakarta Administration has submitted to the City Council on vehicles' roadworthiness based on emission tests.
The council's deliberations should be completed within three to six months, the head of the city's environmental bureau, Aboejoewono Aboeprajitno, told The Jakarta Post yesterday.
Aboejoewono said that once the bill becomes a city bylaw, there would probably be an adjustment period of one or two months before the regulation was enforced.
Thereafter, all vehicles would have to pass emission tests before their number plate registration licenses could be extended, he said.
The new bylaw is in compliance with the 1992 Traffic and Land Transport Law which states that all vehicles must pass roadworthiness tests, Aboejoewono said.
The administration originally hoped the emission-tests bill could be enacted in September, when the 1992 Traffic Law was expected to become fully enforceable after a five-year trial period, he said.
The administration has already conducted emission tests on vehicles at selected spots in the capital over the past year.
The results were hardly encouraging.
Only 54.3 percent of 10,880 vehicles picked up in the first three months of this year passed.
The trial tests found that vehicles using diesel fuel had the highest failure rate, at 56 percent. Gasoline-fueled cars had a failure rate of 39 percent. The tests also found that nearly a third of taxis which use the supposedly clean petroleum gas failed the emission tests.
The trial run confirmed that the older the vehicle, the more likely it would fail the tests. Fifty-seven percent of vehicles run on gasoline made before 1980 failed the tests, compared with 53 percent of those made between 1980 and 1985.
The figures were 47 percent for vehicles manufactured between 1985 and 1990, and 34 percent for those made after 1990.
The environmental bureau found a correlation between the size of a vehicle engine and emission test failure: the smaller the engine size, the more likely it was to fail the test: 48 percent of vehicles powered by less than 2000cc engines failed the tests, compared with 27 percent of vehicles with bigger than 2000cc engines.
Aboejoewono said he hoped people would take the tests seriously, adding that there currently seemed to be strong public apathy toward vehicle exhaust pollution.
The vehicle emission test program was part of The Blue Sky campaigns, designed to improve public awareness about the need to reduce poisonous gases emitted by engines.
The Environmental Impact Management Agency designed the campaign in 1992 to address increased air pollution caused by the growth in industrial and transportation waste. (07)