I use Topozone:

http://www.topozone.com/

To capture the map, I use a screen snapshot. For our purposes, it works.

Bob Wilson

 

Ahh, yes.... Thank you very much!

Bob for president!

 

New insight but in route planning USA drivers may want to look at a clockwise rotation from home to work and back to home. The reason is if you are on the left side of a direct line between home and work, you will have at least one or more right turns, which may be yield turns not requiring a full stop. On the way back, the same trick works. If you step back and look at separate routes between home and work, it would look like traveling in a clockwise direction.

Drivers in left-hand side driving areas may want to use a counter-clockwise orientation.

Just a suggestion to maximize use of non-stopping, yield turns.

Bob Wilson

 

Go to http://www.topozone.com and click on View Maps in the upper left corner and put in your Place. I use this site all the time in my job, it's a freebie and you can print out your topo maps.

 

Interesting.

In fact, UPS has removed left hand turns from alot of their routes in order to save a projected $600 million.

http://multichannelmerchant.com/opsa...fuel_conserve/

 

So today I decided to take the day off from work and explore an alternate route home from my place of business. Based on the maps I acquired from www.topozone.com I charted my new route and headed out.

The new route home is 1.8 miles longer than my original path, but being that it is all side roads it takes about 2x as long. The speeds are about 40mph average versus 60mph. I did a quick check to what the added mileage would require I get in terms of MPG to make it beneficial, and it returned about 64.8MPG. That's not too much of a stretch considering I normally get about 59-61.

I was excited to see I got nearly 70mpg! The only downside was it took me about 35minutes to go that route.

Another possible downside seems to be that traffic in the evenings will be way more congested than when I drove it this morning at 8am. I could be wrong on that, but it seems logical. Plus on the slower roads, people seem to be more interested in going as fast as possible because they just can't stand to be going 35-40

The next time I travel to work I am going to take this route back and see what the traffic is like during rush hour. If it's not significant, I will probably be taking a new route home from now on.

 

I have been getting around 55-57mpg average for my daily commute which is about right for combined city/highway EPA numbers (using the old numbers).
For the last two days I have changed my route to/from work to include more surface street driving. So now I have 66.5mpg showing for 95 miles on my current tank. (of that 95 miles there is a 30 mile side trip to the next town over on the way to work which was at 64.5mpg)

The new route is 1.6 miles longer, so its a win for saving gas, but it is 12 minutes longer, so lets look at the savings....

One way, old vs new
20.6mi/55mpg = .37 gal
22.2mi/65.5mpg = .33 gal

round trip
old gals = .74 gals/day * 5 = 3.7 gals/week * 50 = 185 gals/year
new gals = .66 gals/day * 5 = 3.3 gals/week * 50 = 165 gals/year

= 20 gallons savings = about $60.00

But I have to drive 100 extra hours per year to get that savings. In other words I am earning 60 cents per extra hour driving.

I think my time is worth more than that so I guess I'll just do this to have one great tank average and then go back to the old route.

 

Perfect!

That is exactly what is needed. Testing, evaluate the results and then with new knowledge, choose the solution that best works.

Bob Wilson

 

So I've been driving my alternate route the last few days on the way home from work, and I'm loving it! Yesterday I pulled 73.5MPG over 16.1 miles, and that includes numerous stoplights, and rush hour traffic. So there were times where I felt I could be gliding, but wasn't, because of cars behind me.

I'm going to keep working at this route until I have all the little nuances figured out. My short term goal is to get up to 80MPG for a trip, and then slowly work up to getting all trips on this route at 80MPG.

Now if only I could convince my wife to let me drive that way on the way in to work.... I'd be getting 70MPG plus for an entire tank. We carpool, so her arrival time is of some importance. Trying to get a woman to wake up 15 minutes earlier to compensate is out of the question