By EWAN KENNEDY
5 January 2009

I walked from a hotel to the domestic terminal at Sydney airport the other day. I could have caught the hotel shuttle bus but I reasoned that 15 minutes of early morning exercise would do me good and tie in with my new-year’s resolution to look after myself better.

Was I wrong! The closer I got to the terminals the smellier the air became and the more unpleasant it was to breathe.

The morning weather was perfectly still and the lower-level roads at this airport are partly covered over so there’s not a lot of air circulation even at the best of times. The mixture of LPG fumes from cabs, diesel exhausts from buses and delivery vans and just-burnt unleaded from petrol engines created a most unpleasant miasma that wasn’t doing my lungs any good at all. Or the lungs of anyone not smart enough to switch their cars’ ventilation system to its recirculating mode.

I’ve been in third world countries that have cleaner air than the biggest airport in what's arguably the most beautiful city in Australia.

Exhaust emission regulations are becoming ever more stringent in Australia and vehicle engineers are doing an excellent job at meeting, indeed often exceeding them. So why was the airport air so bad?

Speed bumps that’s why. I’ve never counted them, but on about two kilometres of road there must be close to a dozen sets of them.

At Sydney airport the speed limit is a sensible 40 km/h, but the speed humps require you to slow to about 20 km/h in a car, even less in a bus or truck. Question: if the limit is 40 km/h, why force drivers to slow to just half that speed?

Every time a vehicle slows it puts out extra emissions as the load on the engine is reduced suddenly. Brake dust is created and adds to the problem, though thankfully you don’t get a lungfull of asbestos from brakes these days.

But that’s not the worst of it, it’s getting the vehicles back up to the 40 km/h speed limit again. Believe it or not, a vehicle that’s accelerating creates five to ten times as much pollution as one travelling at a steady speed. Not to forget the extra noise caused by the engine working harder. Noise that echoes unpleasantly around the closed roadways of Sydney airport.

Thousands of vehicles move through Sydney airport every day, each creating five to ten times as much air pollution as they should. Is it any wonder I felt ill and cranky at bureaucratic overkill, this morning?

This obsession with making vehicles move slowly just has to stop. It has been shown that exceeding speed limits is only the major factor in a small percentage of crashes. Yet the authorities are prepared to force tens of thousands of people at Sydney airport to breathe potentially dangerous levels of pollution, all in the name of their drive-very-slowly campaigns.

ewan@marque.com.au