Riley and Sarah

From a top the Acropolis we looked out over a sprawling Athens. It stretched out in every direction covering the land with buildings, roads, and about 4.5 million people.

There was a haze in the air. We asked the guide from our hostel if it was humidity or smog and he responded that it was mostly humidity. Apparently the city no longer has a smog problem thanks to something called “odd-even rationing”. Ever heard of it? I sure hadn’t so I decided to investigate.

I went to my trusty friend Wikipedia and here’s what I found: “Odd-even rationing is a method of rationing in which access to some resource is restricted to half the population on any given day.” In situations where this method has been implemented zero has been considered an even number. One problem that has arisen is that seven times each year there are back to back “odd” days giving the “odd” people a slight advantage.

Water and gasoline seem to be two of the most commonly restricted resources when it comes to odd-even rationing.

A person’s outdoor water usage may be restricted according to whether their house number is even or odd. Sarah seems to remember something like this in Barrie, Ontario when she was growing up.

A person may only be allowed to drive or to purchase gasoline on alternative days, according to whether the last digit of their license plate is even or odd.

I want to focus on the automobile aspect of odd even rationing since this is how the method is being applied in Greece.

What might this method do for a city like Toronto where smog alerts are quite frequent, especially during the summer months? Vehicle and gasoline usage is surely not the only cause of smog, but perhaps reducing the number of cars on the road could improve the situation, as it has in Greece.

If odd-even rationing for automobile use was considered a viable option in Canada I wonder how we would react. Would we see it as an opportunity to start participating in environmental solutions or would we see it as an attack on our comfortable, convenient North American lifestyle? I have my suspicions.

Nevertheless, with environmental concerns growing worldwide it seems inevitable that there will be changes to our lifestyle in the near future. I can’t say whether odd-even rationing will ever be a part of these changes, but I guess the bigger question is how we will react to anything that prioritizes the environment over comfort and convenience.

Will we embrace it or clinch tightly to the lifestyle we’ve grown so fond of.

- Riley