Do anti-idling bylaws reduce pollution? We have one here and I still see empty trucks and SUVs sitting in parking lots and driveways with their engines running when it’s barely below zero. Our bylaw here even got mentioned on American TV – but I personally think it’s a good idea. I don’t want to have to inhale exhaust when I’m out walking my dog with my kids. – Corinne, Ottawa
Anti-idling bylaws can help keep the air cleaner in Canadian cities, but it’s not clear exactly how much tailpipe pollution they’re preventing, an environmental expert said.
“One of the goals of these bylaws is prevention – and it’s hard to know how well that is working,” said Sarah Buchanan, campaigns director with the not-for-profit Toronto Environmental Alliance. “We don’t actually know how many people hear about the bylaw and decide they’re not going to idle in the first place.”
Several Canadian cities, including Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, Ottawa and Montreal have had laws that limit how long drivers can idle for more than a decade.
While most cities’ laws apply throughout the city, others only apply in certain areas. Edmonton, for instance, only limits idling in front of schools and hospitals – and only when the temperature is above zero degrees Celsius.
Ottawa just strengthened its 17-year-old bylaw to remove an exemption for temperatures below zero and above 27 degrees Celsius.
The new law limits idling to 10 minutes on cold and hot days – and, like the previous law, three minutes for the rest of the year.
Ottawa City Council rejected a recommendation from city staff for five-minute and one-minute limits. Officers respond to complaints about idling vehicles and issue verbal warnings or tickets, which come with a $500 fine, the city said in an e-mail.
Since the new law came into effect on Jan. 1, the city received 91 idling complaints and issued one ticket. From 2020 to 2024, there was an average of about 270 complaints and seven tickets per year.
When then-federal Liberal Party leadership candidate Chrystia Freeland was on the HBO show “Real Time With Bill Maher” in February, Maher brought up Ottawa’s bylaw as an example of “virtue signalling.”
“Now I’ve been in Canada in the winter – it’s pretty [expletive] cold,” Maher said, “The reasoning is it’s going to put a dent in global warming. I don’t think it is.”
Clearing the air?
When it comes to climate change, how big of a problem is idling?
“[We] estimated that if every Ottawa driver reduced daily idling in their vehicles by two minutes, it would decrease carbon dioxide emissions by about 31.2 million kilograms a year,” Valérie Bietlot, Ottawa’s public policy development manager, said in an e-mail. “[That’s] the equivalent of removing 6,780 [fossil fuel-powered] vehicles from Ottawa roads.”
While the federal government has no jurisdiction over city idling bylaws, Natural Resources Canada (NRCan) said that idling a car with a three-litre engine for 10 minutes burns a quarter litre of gas and could emit 575 grams of CO2.
“Over time, this adds up to hundreds of dollars in wasted fuel and potentially significant emissions,” Marie Martin, an NRCan spokeswoman, said in an e-mail.
Plus, an idling car’s tailpipe pumps other harmful pollutants – including nitrogen oxides and fine particulate matter – into the air. They contribute to premature deaths and health problems including asthma, childhood leukemia and lung cancer, Martin said.
So, how long should you be idling? If you’re parked, you shouldn’t keep the engine running for longer than one minute, NRCan said.
And even on an especially cold winter day, you should only need two or three minutes of idling to warm up your car before you start to drive.
“Contrary to popular belief, excessive idling is not an effective way to warm up your [vehicle’s engine], even in cold weather,” states an NRCan web page on idling. “The best way to warm it up is to drive it.”
The myth about warming up your car on a cold day
‘Whack-a-mole?’
Because most cities don’t have officers patrolling for idling, they don’t issue many tickets. For example, last year Vancouver issued 24 tickets for idling. Toronto hasn’t issued an idling ticket since 2019, but it does issue warnings (there were 716 warnings In 2023, the most recent year with numbers available).
“We can’t send enough bylaw officers out there to play that game of whack-a-mole to give every single idler a ticket,” Buchanan said. ”I think it’s a good idea to have the bylaws but then target enforcement to the biggest and dirtiest offenders [such as delivery trucks].”
To tackle idling and congestion, cities need to look at why so many people take cars for short trips instead of walking, cycling or taking transit, Buchanan said.
“Every day when I walk my kids to school, there’s a lineup of SUVs idling with parents dropping their kids off and we have to walk around them,” she said. “Why are they driving in the first place? I have talked to some parents about it and they do raise very valid concerns about two intersections really close to the school where drivers run through the stop signs all the time.”
So, if cities work to discourage unnecessary driving by making neighbourhoods safer for pedestrians and adding bike lanes, it could help reduce both idling and traffic congestion, she said.
“When you design neighbourhoods for cars and not for people, what happens is people get in their cars,” she said. “It’s not shocking.”
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