SMOG WATCH : Stand Up and Cheer

There are days when the rules pile up and the costs keep rising and the mountains still hide in the haze, and Southern California’s eternal struggle for clean air seems all stick and no carrot.

Then there are days like Wednesday. That was when the South Coast Air Quality Management District formally closed the books on the 1989-90 smog season and declared it probably the best year of the 40 for which it has pollution records.

Last smog season was pretty light, and the one that ended on Wednesday was 24% better, as reckoned by the number of days that smog was thick enough to prompt warnings for people with respiratory problems to stay indoors and take it easy. If you go back to 1977, the season was a 300% improvement.

Southern Californians deserve a lot of the credit. They have paid for cleaner air over the years, supporting increasingly expensive pollution controls, often with results that cannot be seen with the naked eye--tears or no.

Just think how much worse smog would be had nothing been done. The newest cars on the road trap 96% of the dirt that used to ooze out of tailpipes just 20 years ago. It will take a while before the oldest cars on the road are 1990 models, but the day is coming.

The sticks will not wither away. The rules will keep piling up. The weather, which cooperated in making for conditions that didn’t trap smog as much as usual, may conspire to brew up another rough smog season sometime up ahead. But this year demonstrates that the carrots are coming along, too.