The nation's first experience with a tough new program of automobile emissions testing that the federal government will soon require in urban areas around the country has gone so badly that Maine, the program's bellwether state, has had to suspend it.

And resentment against the program, which could prove expensive to many thousands of drivers, is such that the legislatures of at least two other states, Pennsylvania and Vermont, are now balking at adopting it, even though their resistance could ultimately cost them tens of millions of dollars in federal highway funds.The new testing began in Maine on July 1 and immediately encountered a vast array of start-up problems, intense public criticism and even a petition drive aimed at repealing it, a step that would cause the state to lose $72 million a year, virtually all of what Washington provides here for highway construction and maintenance.

Only two months after the program had begun, Maine decided in the face of citizen fury to drop it until next March while efforts were made to work out the kinks.

The new testing system, developed as a way to meet the requirements of the Federal Clean Air Act, is a significant technical advance over the familiar neighborhood-garage tailpipe test, which measures hydrocarbons and carbon monoxide, two of the three major pollutants from auto exhaust.

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In the new test, computers connected to a treadmill-like device that causes a vehicle to replicate its highway performance at various speeds measure not only those two pollutants but also the third, nitrogen oxide, which creates ground-level ozone. The treadmill is needed to gauge nitrogen oxide because cars tend to produce much more of this pollutant when under load than when stationary.

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