The traffic rules seems to get stringer and stringer with every passing month as a recent bill passed in Arkansas prohibits anyone from smoking in the car with children boarded whilst seven other states are in the process of acknowledging this law.
The question here is not the stringency of rules or the fact that smoking in the car with packed passengers is being penalized legally. What we as an individual also need to realize is that it causes a lot of harm to the on-board passengers so the realization should come irrespective the law being framed to counter such an act.
A recent study conducted by the researchers at Stanford reveals that a packed car with the AC working and couple of cigarettes smoked would mean that the entire lot of passengers would have been exposed to particulates well above the recommended government safety standards.
To quote a stanza from this study published in the Journal of Exposure Science and Environmental Epidemiology by a consulting professor of civil and environmental engineering (CEE) at Stanford, Neil Klepeis mentioned:
This is the most comprehensive set of measurements ever made of vehicle air change rates and smoke particulate levels in real driving conditions. Conditions in a car with a smoker can vary widely, but in some situations we can confirm that passengers will receive an exposure to secondhand smoke that is considered unhealthful.”
The message is clear that it is not only a high polluting vehicle which could cause harm to a car flocked with passengers but even a cigarette can do a lot of damage. If the law pertaining to the same is enacted throughout the stretch of US, the habit of boarding your car and lighting your first cigarette whilst your kid sits at the co-driver seat would in my opinion become a guised act. What really needs to be changed is the attitude of people so that they understand the consequences and not take it as a legal compulsion ultimately practicing it concealingly.
[Image]
