Since 1982, residents of these Northern Virginia counties: Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, Prince William, Stafford and the cities of Alexandria, Fairfax, Falls Church, Manassas, and Manassas Park, have been subject to a mandatory vehicle emissions testing program, a policy enacted in 1982 under the 1970 Clean Air Act to combat significant regional air pollution.
While Virginians outside of Northern Virginia will have no experience with this testing program which is separate from the more familiar mandatory safety inspections, it requires a detailed inspection of a cars emissions system, including a reading of effluents from the cars exhaust. However, four decades of technological progress, dramatic improvements in air quality, and evolving economic realities have rendered this mandate on Northern Virginia drivers obsolete.
Modern vehicles are now very clean and are equipped with sophisticated On-Board Diagnostic (OBD) systems they check for emissions issues and make separate emissions testing redundant. The program imposes a significant economic burden on Northern Virginia residents, totaling over $87 million biennially, for negligible environmental benefit. Paradoxically, the process of complying with the test itself generates unnecessary pollution that could negate even the minimal benefits from the testing claimed by advocates…