It's not cars that are the problem – it's old cars.

As you have probably read or heard, "pollution spewing from vehicle tailpipes kills about 440 people in Toronto and costs the city's economy $2.2 billion every year."

Those apocalyptic numbers are based on a report issued and heavily promoted by the City of Toronto's public health unit.

The stated solution to the problem is to get cars off the road and people onto public transit.

To that end, conveniently included with the report is a list of "policy prescriptions" for addressing the issue.

Not surprisingly, politicians and media alike have seized on the idea of tolls on roads coming into the city as an instant panacea, which – coincidentally – would also enrich the city's diminishing coffers.

Criticizing any action aimed at reducing unnecessary deaths is politically incorrect. But as well-meaning as that report may be, it has some serious flaws in logic.

One issue is the focus on vehicles.

The 440 deaths blamed on the automobile are a subset of more than 1,700 annual deaths attributable to the effects of airborne smog, says a health unit spokesperson.

Why, then, is all the focus placed on the minority contributor? Why not on the sources of 70 per cent of the problem?

I don't mean to diminish the impact of the auto's contribution to smog-related deaths, where real. But cars and trucks are a convenient target that shifts attention away from greater contributors to the problem.

The fact is, the auto industry has done more to address the smog issue over the past four decades than any other. The smog-forming gases in the exhaust from new cars and trucks have now been reduced by more than 99 per cent.

In some highly polluted areas, new vehicles are actually said to be air purifiers, in that the exhaust coming out the tailpipe is cleaner than the air going into the engine.

Cumulatively, new vehicles contribute less than a tenth of 1 per cent of Canada's smog-forming gases annually – an inconsequential contribution.

Conversely, one 20-year-old vehicle, even if it is in top condition, produces as many smog-forming emissions as 37 new vehicles.

Simply through natural attrition, as new vehicles replace old, without any change in policy or emissions regulations, the total contribution of all light-duty vehicles to smog in Canada will be reduced by two-thirds by 2020.

So the problem is already being solved.

If a real need to accelerate the solution arises, which certainly would not be a bad thing, the appropriate prescription is not to penalize all cars and trucks, and their drivers. It is to address the major source of emissions within the vehicle subset: old cars and trucks.

It is an issue already being addressed by such programs as Car Heaven, which, in Ontario, offers charitable tax credits or discount coupons for the purchase of new vehicles.

Much more could be done in the way of incentives to replace older vehicles with newer ones.

It's a fallacy to think that people can be automatically transferred from their cars to mass transit. For many, if not most drivers, it is just not going to happen.

If public transit could meet their needs for personal mobility, they would have already abandoned their cars and trucks, given the huge disincentives to drive that already exist. I'm thinking, of course, of exorbitant parking fees and daily near-gridlock conditions.

So let's focus on further improving the situation, rather than simply demonizing the auto and penalizing drivers.

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