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Winnipeg Free Press - PRINT EDITION

City vehicles' idling to be studied

Black boxes will track fleet waste

By: Lindsey Wiebe

Posted: 04/8/2009 1:00 AM | Comments: 0 (including replies)

THE city will install special black boxes in most of its 1,600 fleet vehicles as part of a million-dollar effort to measure how much time the vehicles spend idling on the road, and how much gas each of them guzzles.

The technology upgrade will let officials track idling trends in different types of vehicles, "anything from riding lawn mowers to front-end loaders," said Ajaleigh Williams, project coordinator with Winnipeg's Fleet Management Agency.

"Maybe they don't even know that they're idling that much," Williams told a crowd Tuesday during a half-day conference dubbed the Economics of Going Green, put on by the Winnipeg Chamber of Commerce and Assiniboine Credit Union.

The city will spend just under $1 million to install the black boxes, which sit discreetly under the dashboard or in other places where they won't get in the way, said Williams. When vehicles fill up at the city's eight main fuel stations, the data collected in the black box will be transmitted to a tower where the information will be stored to be assessed later, she said.

The technology will be provided by Coencorp, a Quebec company that already serves industries including airport authorities, trucking companies, car dealerships and government fleets.

Winnipeg uses 23 million litres of fuel every year in its vehicles, said Williams, and the black boxes will mean cash savings down the road. The new technology can also fight gas theft, since people won't be able to fill up anyone else's vehicle at the stations.

Most of the fleet vehicles will get the boxes, which cost between $300 and $600 each, depending on the size of the vehicle. The city has already installed 300 of them since the project began last year, and the rest should be up and running by the end of this year.

Winnipeg is working on an anti-idling plan to get fleet drivers to limit idling time to three minutes, said Williams, and data collected will tell officials which vehicles idle longer, and why.

Some vehicles need to idle in order to power things like safety lights, said Williams, but in cases like those the city can look at installing auxiliary power units, which use much less energy than just burning gas.

"A lot of these vehicles are idling all day at the job sites," she said.

Williams said she has no doubt the system will pay for itself, and says the technology can be reused when vehicles are retired.

The Economics of Going Green Conference was put on in partnership with the Better Buildings 2009 Conference, which ran Tuesday afternoon.

The earlier conference included talks on environmental initiatives from businesses and city officials

lindsey.wiebe@freepress.mb.ca

Firms' progress

Some presenters from the Economics of Going Green conference and boosted sustainable:

McNally Robinson's Prairie Ink restaurants: Uses takeout containers made of plant-based plastics from the Waste Reduction Store, composts food waste, replaced single-use peanut butter and jam packages with bulk supplies and refillable containers.

City of Brandon: Boosted transit ridership by giving post-secondary students a month of free rides on Brandon Transit, made all city council meetings paperless, has three buses running on used fry oil.

Biomass Energy System Technologies: Sells heating systems using biomass straw bales.

Delta Winnipeg: Expects to save $65,000 a year with its new hybrid gas-electric heating system.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition April 8, 2009 B4

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