Throwback Thursday: Pollution Busting Vans Took to the Streets, Then Mysteriously Disappeared

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of yesteryear.

When there's something strange,
Goin' on in your atmosphere,
Who Beijing gonna call?
The smog busters!

Well, at least they did in 2008. Yes, like vans filled with wisecracking demon catchers, a trio of such vehicles took to Beijing's streets nine years ago this month. But instead of chasing the paranormal, they were cracking down on even the more frightful issue of Beijing's pollution. More specifically: the exhaust sputtering cars that darkened our skies.

Word of Beijing's high tech pollution monitoring vans first caught our attention back then, when TBJ blogger Michaela Kabat wrote about how these vehicles used "laser technology to measure the carbon levels in the exhaust from passing vehicles." In less than a second, that technology would give the smog fighting teams in these vans detailed readings about the fumes, before one of their automatic cameras "snapped an image of the license plate of any offending vehicle."

From there, the smog busters would quickly alert the police, who would pull over the violating drivers and fine them RMB 100.

At the time, three such smog monitoring vans were in operation, and there were plans to commission 12 more by 2009. Each of the vehicles cost a smooth RMB 1.3 million. The initiative was part of Beijing's push to ensure cars met strict emissions standards. However, our writer noted back then that "we're surprised that the vans aren't getting much of a publicity campaign yet – you'd think that getting residents aware of the threat of being fined would be half the battle."

More mysterious still: the vans failed to make more headlines in the following months, and unsurprisingly we've never caught a glimpse of one on the streets ourselves, and have been unable to find any mention of their status ever since. Like a ghost – or smog on a windy day – these pollution monitoring vans seem to have vanished.

It's a shame that these vans, just like the water cannons that were to supposedly make an appearance late last year, didn't become a fixture on the capital's streets. Aside from the fact that laser equipped anti-pollution vans are just undeniably awesome (at least for a sci-fi geek like me), we also in all seriousness can't deny that more pollution monitoring would be more than welcome. The issue of banning high-emission vehicles was still making headlines as recently as November, so we're confident that the issue is by no means solved and that pollution busting vans would still very much be of use. Thankfully Beijing authorities haven't given up on the issue entirely – a few weeks ago the South China Morning Post reported on pollution monitoring satellites checking up on Beijing's air quality from above.

Still, we'd rather have a literal down-to-earth rag-tag team of pollution watchers, kicking ass and taking the names of pollution-spewing vehicle owners.

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Email: kylemullin@truerun.com
Twitter: @MulKyle
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Photos: Driving.co.uk, Coming Soon, The Times