Clean Air ‘Violators’ Targeted by Activists
By Brian Covert
Staff Writer
All car, truck and bus drivers in the Kansai area beware: Leave your parked vehicle running and you risk being penalized by the Clean Air Group.
The penalty in this case being a written appeal and brief lecture to each culpable driver of the dangers of air pollution due to engines running when the car is not.
The idea for this local approach to environmental safety began three years ago with German-born Gunther Schafer, an instructor at Osaka Gakuin University and Konan University in Kobe.
“I was really worried (about the environment) when I saw so many cars leaving their engines running,” says Schafer, 34. “This made me really angry.”
So, he began walking up to each vehicle he saw and asking them in Japanese to cut their engines if they were not going anywhere. Later he printed up an explanatory handbill as an added imperative for the drivers.
Schafer formally started an organization called the Clean Air Group in March, having gotten mostly agreeable reactions from the estimated 1,000 drivers he had approached face-to-face during the previous year.
His success rate at getting people to stop their idling engines stands at 99 percent, he claims: “The other 1 percent, maybe they have a complex or they are too shy to do that in front of a foreigner. There are some people who don’t care at all” about such environmental concerns.
In one successful case last December, Schafer appealed to the city of Kobe to get drivers of buses parked at the JR Sannomiya Station bus terminal underpass to turn off their engines for the sake of passing pedestrians and people waiting to board. City officials agreed and just such a sign now stands at the terminal.
To a lesser extent, transportation bureaus in Osaka and other local municipalities have acknowledged the Clean Air Group’s concerns and taken initial steps in doing something about the issue.
Schafer says he had initiated the group in the hope of expanding his activities and attracting more foreign residents of Kansai to the cause.
While he has been relatively successful with the former, there is still a long way to go with the latter. So far, Schafer’s only committed foreign compatriot has been 26-year-old Rod Walters of Britain.
“That’s our tax money that runs their engines as well,” says Walters, an instructor at Asahi High School in Osaka. “We pay taxes too, so we feel that we have some say in this. We’re not just a bunch of foreigners who are getting narky.”
The more amusing excuses the duo has gotten from drivers for not stopping their engines include “They didn’t teach me that at driving school,” “My brakes won’t work without the engine on,” and from illegal parkers: “I need to be ready to get out of here in a hurry if the cops come by to ticket me.”
Ironically, police officers are considered among the worst offenders of engine-overkill. Walters remembers on one occasion appealing the Clean Air Group’s concerns to a policeman who sat in his idling car on an Osaka side street — only to have the guy angrily jump out of the car and interrogate Walters for apparently disturbing a police officer in the line of duty.
“We try to find as many ways to scotch (people’s) excuses in advance, because we’ve heard a lot now. We know what they are,” says Walters with a grin.
And in cases where absentee drivers leave their keys inside unattended vehicles, the Clean Air Group members have no hesitation about simply reaching inside and turning the ignition off themselves.
From here, Schafer’s group plans to take its case to higher ground, namely the environmental bureaus of Kansai-area cities, driving schools, sightseeing firms, and taxi and trucking companies — anywhere and everywhere that drivers are sure to get the message.
More information on the Clean Air Group can be obtained by writing to: Gunther Schafer, xxx Maeda-cho, Ashiya-shi, Hyogo-ken 659.