Engine Trouble.(environmental activist George Pakenham on his drive against engine idling)

George Pakenham works for an international mortgage desk on Wall Street, but his business cards are printed with Section 4-08, Subsection P, of the New York City traffic code, as it pertains to engine idling. (Roughly speaking, it is prohibited for more than three minutes, and carries potential fines of several hundred dollars.) Pakenham is concerned about the quality of the air, and the quantity of oil, and he has distributed nearly two thousand cards over the past two and a half years to drivers who refuse to shut off their engines at curbside. He typically begins with a rap on the window and a preemptive apology: "Sorry to bother you, my friend, but you might not know . . ." Only a handful of the cards have been crumpled up, tossed back out the window, or both, in his presence.

Pakenham, who is fifty-nine, does not own a car. (When riding shotgun, he sometimes reaches over and kills the ignition at stoplights.) His friends call him the Verdant Vigilante, and few documents depict the uneasy intersection of civic activism and ordinary city life as well as the Excel spreadsheet he maintains, recording his "encounters" on the street. Pakenham likes keeping statistics. He has, for instance, a seventy-eight-per-cent success rate in asking motorists to cease idling. His target demographic is eighty-nine per cent male and fifty-six per cent white. (He uses "amigo" instead of "friend" if he judges a driver to be Latino.) ConEd is the worst corporate offender. Only twenty-nine per cent of idlers are familiar with the law. He recognizes that his "failures" are in many ways more interesting--"I'll walk away and they'll rev their engine just to annoy me, just to show they're powerful jungle creatures," he said recently--and so he includes a comment with each entry, for entertainment or posterity:

November 30, 2007, black male, limo, age "50+": "He was peeing into a bottle and I disturbed him."

February 12, 2008, white female, truck, age "50+": " 'I won't freeze for you.' "

June 23, 2008, white male, limo, age "50+": " 'I'm not an amigo. I'm a comrade.' "

July 11, 2008, black female, bus (Access-A-Ride), age "25-35": " 'Then don't breathe.' "

August 8, 2008, white male, sedan, age "35-50": "Guy was rolling a joint."