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Retirement age for cars? 10 yrs, suggests DM!

DUBAI — The Dubai Municipality has suggested a 10-year retirement for vehicles on the Dubai Roads.

This comes after a study conducted under the project called 'On-road Vehicle Emission Measurement Using Remote Sensing Device' (RSD) on Dubai roads, which was conducted by the civic body officials.

The project, which had been on for 10 months, has revealed that the vehicle pollution in Dubai is around 13 per cent (for vehicles using petrol) while the pollution rate in the US cities like Virginia is 2.5 per cent and Michigan 2 per cent and that in Canada is 4.7 per cent.

The study also showed the pollution rate of vehicles using diesel in Dubai stood at around 19 per cent.

Khaleej Times had reported on February 19 that the Dubai Municipality and the Roads and Transport Authority were considering the removal of old vehicles from Dubai roads in a bid to reduce pollution levels.

Engineer Redha Hassan Salman, Head of Environmental Protection and Safety Section in the Environment Department of Dubai Municipality, said the higher emission of pollutants in Dubai was attributed to the high temperature, which goes up to 47.5 degree Celsius.

Five major air pollutants detected

The civic body conducted the survey at 43 locations across the city in cooperation with RTA and Dubai Police with the aim of formulating effective strategies and policies to control vehicle emissions which account for over 75 per cent of the city's air pollutants.

'The idea was to measure pollutant levels in a vehicle's tailpipe while the vehicle is plying on the road. Five major air pollutants — hydrocarbon (HC), carbon monoxide (CO), nitrogen oxides (NOx), carbon dioxide (CO2), and smoke emissions — were detected. The remote sensing technology helped avoid connecting the testing device physically to a vehicle.

Feasible step to reduce pollution

'Based on the study, we suggest retirement of vehicles on Dubai roads after 10 years as a feasible step to reduce pollution,' said Salman.

He noted that emission measurement was evaluated for both public and private sectors for Dubai-and non-Dubai-licensed vehicles covering taxis, buses (public transport, schools, and labourers), heavy vehicles such as trucks and trailers, and private and public cars, in addition to the age of motor vehicles and fuel fleet usage.

The main two factors

'Two factors point to the worsening air pollution situation in Dubai. They are the rapid pace of urbanisation and motorisation. The statistics showed that motor vehicles increased by about 12 per cent on an average annually. Dubai has 541 vehicles per thousand population, which is higher than New York (444), London (345) and Singapore (111),' Salman added. He said that there had been an increase of 30 per cent in the number of vehicles in Dubai from that of 2005 (465,000 vehicles including 5,000 taxis).

'Vehicles in Dubai take 3.1 million trips a day, which is expected to increase to 13.1 million trips a day by the year 2020. This is precisely the reason behind embarking on such a project to know the percentage of vehicles exceeding the emission limit compared to other countries of the world,' the official added.

Among the surveyed vehicles, 87 per cent (96,361) were Dubai registered and the rest (13,808) were registered in the other emirates.

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