18 February 2009

A long ago promised update

This post regards my milege project.
For a recap -- I am tracking the miles per week that I drive my car. Anne and I share a car, so it is the total miles we drive together or seperately. I would like, on that account, to divide all of the numbers herein by two. That, however, would be disingenous as the fact is that I drive more than Anne does. I will leave the numbers unaltered, please bear in mind that these totals are for two people.
These numbers have been tracked for a 20 week period from September 21 to Feburary 15.

Overall total miles driven: 2843.6
Gallons of gas burned: 142
Amount spent on gasoline (Approx) $400
Overall miles per week: 135.4 or 19.34 miles per day.
Miles per week when I worked at TC (the job I quit in October partially because of the long commute) 180.23 Or 25.75 per day.
Post quitting TC avg. 127 or 18 miles per day.
Post quitting TC on weeks we did not drive out of town 69.8 miles per week or 9.98 per day.

These are very interesting numbers to me. I expected the overall total to be lower, and I expected more of a difference between the TC and post TC driving. We did take more than the usual number of out of town trips during the past 20 weeks, betweenthe holidays (two 400+ mile weeks to visit relatives in Iowa) and not working weekends for the first time in years. I'm a little distressed by my non-trip miles of nearly 10 per day. I recognize that that includes the winter, and I have hardly biked anywhere in a couple months, but that still seems high. Must resolve to not drive more. My goal is to have a 0 mile week this spring. Ideally more than one.

Some working definitions
Out of town trip means any trip past the 270 belt or outside the greater Metro east I'm not splitting hairs with this one, pretty well all the trips have been Columbia or Kirksville.

A week is defined as from Sunday morning when I reset the odometer to the next Sunday morning when I reset it again It includes all of the miles my car is driven in that week, weather it is myself, my wife, or borrowed. (I don't think I lent the car out in that time)

I only worked at TC for three weeks of this project, so the numbers will reflect that only figuring lightly into the overall averages.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I think holiday visits to relatives skewed our numbers more than we suspected -- since this 20-week sample includes both Thanksgiving and Christmas. It's true, since it's been such a cold winter, our improvement looks a little sad. I can't wait till the weather improves enough that I can get back to biking every day!