The clean air had a positive psychological effect on citizens since they rarely experience such clean days.
But how long will this pleasant weather last? If the wind dies down, it will certainly not take long for the smog to return.
Again on Friday morning, noisy old buses were belching black soot into the air. And many people, as usual, were driving private cars, despite the fact that most could use public transportation, such as buses or the metro, and they could not use the excuse of overcrowding, since buses and the subway are not busy on Fridays.
On Friday morning some citizens were using private cars to go to buy bread, despite the fact that the bakeries were often hardly 300 meters away from their homes. They did not take the rare opportunity to walk in the street to breathe the clean air on this beautiful winter day.
The “right to clean air” in Tehran and other big cities in Iran has been taken hostage by millions of substandard domestically produced cars, running on low-quality gasoline, and a cultural mindset that regards a private car as a status symbol.
Even though the relevant officials are either indifferent to the problem or not competent enough to address the issue of air pollution, we citizens are not helping matters when we use private cars so much.
Too many Tehran citizens seem to be unaware of the fact that we can never have clean air in this city if they excessively use their private cars.
This situation has created a major public health issue.
The car culture is so ingrained into the minds of most Tehran citizens that they keep rushing to buy automobiles, even though the price of vehicles has risen about 2.5 times in just a few months.
Tehran citizens are obsessed with driving private cars and often violate the law drafted to reduce traffic on highly polluted days, which says that on one day only vehicles with even-numbered license plates are allowed on the street and the next day vehicles with odd-numbered license plates are allowed to ply the streets. Some parents flout this law and drive their children to school, even when the schools are only a 10-minute walk away.
At a time when millions of cars and numerous factories are polluting our air, we should not be making the problem worse through overuse of cars. This is the main reason why days with clean and fresh air are so rare in Tehran.
PA/HG
MNA
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MNA
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