City to enforce emission tests on all vehicles

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)