Well it is afternoon and I am amazed this has not been brought up yet. I am staggered that those "knowledgeable" people in the kantonal government have managed to work out that reducing the speed that cars travel would actually reduce "finestaub" in the air.

What I do not understand is that the same intelligent people also have the ability to place the same restrictions on heavy goods lorries ie reduce their speed to say 60. And could you imagine what would happen if Kantons Aargau and Basel Land banned the things for 8 days? Maybe a bit of attention...

What is the world coming to...

Yes I must say that I am quite taken aback at the stupidy of this. Here's my solution:

Put more parking places in the shopping districts like Dietlikon so that cars don't sit in gridlocked traffic for an hour just waiting to park. You can apply the same to the center of Zurich where cars drive around in circles while all the parking garages are full on a Saturday. The worst part was that they REMOVED parking places so as not to increase parking capacity.

Now let's keep going and build a decent autobahn bypass for Zurich so that the entire transit traffic doesn't slow down going through the city and sitting in bumper to bumper traffic for another hour to clear Zurich.

Then let's make sure buses run on natural gas instead of diesel like some other developed countries. How about taxis and other cars which do high mileage? Why don't they run on the much cleaner LPG? Why is LPG not available at all in Switzerland? What about biodiesel? Why can we not buy biodiesel at the pump? You can in many places in Germany, and France has a good LPG infrastructure as well.

How about a tunnel or two under the traffic hotspots of Zurich? And what about a plan to fix up all the bottlenecks in the road system which are causing traffic to back up for extended periods (and therefore having their engines idling in traffic much longer than is needed). Oh hang on - that plan was already voted on - wasn't it called Avanti or something? The people voted "no" after posters proclaimed there would be MORE pollution (how sick and perverted is that?)

So I think it is ridiculous that now the Kantonal governments are trying to pretend like this is a solution to the problem. Of course we'd love to blame the government, but in a direct democracy we can only blame the voters. Except that hardly any of us can vote, so how does that work?

I'm going to the snow tomorrow, and I don't think I plan to drive 80 the whole way... Mind you, this will probably be the one time when they actually do check speed on the way out there!!

Mark

Just walked outside and was hit by the unmistakeable smell of unfiltered wood smoke. Now where I live pretty much every building has floor heating. This means my neighbours are burning wood, probably not because they need to keep warm, but because they like doing it. How much of our feinstaub problem comes from the uncontrolled unfilitered burning of wood for heating? Why has the government not called on people to stop this, or passed emergency regulations banning it on certain days? Probably because burning wood is considered a "tradition" so nobody wants to bring it up. Or have I missed something?

Hi Mark,

Actually this has also been strictly banned. ie there is a total ban on the burning of wood, lighting of Swedish ovens, Chiminee etc unless there is no other possibility to heat the house. As this is almost certainly not the case you can ring the police and complain. The police are obliged to respond immediately and the fine is CHF 250 with double for repeat offence - No warning you know the usual here's the bill pay in 30 days...

Enjoy

Richard

funnily enough, my chimney builder came today, visited my house to fix something and only mentioned "not to use the fireplace tonight" as he glued some stuff in the area.

I might sue him!
Or I might stay down in my dungeon instead

On the brighter side, the speed limit in Ticino was 200kph yesterday

Right, now I can be really Swiss and start phoning the police about my neighbours.... But seriously, why is it allowed to even build a fireplace in a new building since they all have central heating anyway. It's illegal to build aircon into a new building in canton Zurich (though this has nothing to do with the environment, only stupidity), so why it is legal to burn as much wood as you want, even when there isn't a problem with feinstaub?

Just drove back from Davos tonight. Everybody (except me) was driving at 80. It was unbelievable. This problem has been brewing for AGES and nothing has been done about it, and now we have to do knee jerk reactions to it.

Here's something else I find strange. A huge percentage of the population smoke - are they also concerned about feinstaub? Now we are up in arms about the dangers posed by feinstaub - increased cost on the health care etc.. Is it just me, or is something seriously wrong with this picture?

Was it the same neighbour who shopped you for parking your car over 72 hours <evil grin>


Gav

I don't actually know which of my neighbours was burning wood - there's a few townhouses around, and given that it was dark it might have been hard to tell. In addition, some of those buildings have multiple apartments in them so it would have had to be something for the police I guess. But I was busy getting ready for skiing, and about to go out so I didn't really have a chance to follow it up. The parking freak lives further up the road (I think). I only have one annoying neighbour close by and he is American. He swore at my girlfriend one night, and when I went to his door to ask him about it he slammed the door in my face and said "go back to England" which was really quite funny since I'm not from England and don't have an English accent, but anyway, I digress and am getting off topic - we were supposed to be talking about speed limits and feinstaub

Mark

Hey Mark you are being naive. Do you really think that an American could pick out that you have a mongrel accent? Its not American therefore by default as it is the English language and not heavily accented it must be English... Then again most Americans are friendly so I reckon you got a bad'n there

I have a new house with a fireplace and it's cute.
You convicts have no taste