Last year on the Kyiv city administration’s commission, the Transport Ecology program was developed. And a few days ago a presentation was given by Ekotrans, the municipal enterprise set up to realize the idea. Vadym Bohdan, director of the company, said that, although there is an Ecology Office attached to the State Motor Licensing and Inspection Department (DAI), it does not function properly due to the absence of necessary equipment. As for Ekotrans, it is going to tackle the matter in earnest, starting with the creation of control points similar to those of the DAI, scattered all over the central highways of the capital and properly equipped to check the ecological state of vehicles. In addition to a penalty function they are supposed to perform an auxiliary one. If inspectors find out that a vehicle contaminates the environment too much, it will be sent to an Ekotrans workshop to be provided with mufflers that reduce air pollution. Indeed, that will only be possible if the vehicle has already passed an ecological test, and the driver has received the corresponding stub, its cost depending on the model and life of every car. According to Vadym Bohdan, that will help to increase financing of ecological actions, without the city budget coming under an additional load.
The ‘stick’ policy will be applied for the same purpose to cars that do not meet ecological standards. However, they are going to arrange parking lots for such cars at all the entrances to the capital. Thus if a driver is aware that his vehicle is not an ecologically clean one and is loath to pay a fine at every control station, he will have an opportunity to leave the car in a parking lot and use public transport when traveling within the city.
But the most painful question of the program is connected with petrol. Ekotrans insists that they should shift altogether from usual gasoline to bottled gas, since it is considered to satisfy the Euro-4 standard that is being gradually adopted by all countries in order to prevent all their population becoming ill. The enterprise plans to develop a location scheme for refueling stations with different kinds of petrol and to build stations where only bottled gas will be available. As for the actual ‘gasoline’ and ‘solar petrol’ stations, they will be thoroughly tested in terms of all ecological standards. But an important question is still to be answered: how will the petrol business bigwigs react?
