How More Efficient Parking Can Save You Gas

You’re headed downtown for a concert, and hoping you won’t have to circle the city for an hour before you find a spot that’s not too far away from the venue.  Once you get there, you discover that, of course, finding a parking spot is going to be a huge headache.  You finally find a conveniently located garage, only to learn that it’s closed today.  By the time you finally find a spot, you’ve wasted untold amounts of gas.  Sound familiar?

Many people don’t even realize how much gas they’re really wasting because they either legitimately can’t find a good place to park, or they’re too lazy to walk.  If you’re guilty of circling parking lots waiting for a close spot to open up so you don’t have to make the 50-foot trek across the lot, stop.  Just stop.  Not only do you annoy and creep people out by hovering behind them as they walk to their vehicles, you’re wasting precious resources for no good reason.  Personally, my way of dealing with people like you is to intentionally walk as slowly as possible, walk up to a car that isn’t mine to fake you out and then give you the finger.  You only have an excuse if you’re pregnant, lugging something large and heavy or somehow disabled.

It’s also easy to miss the fact that backing out of a parking spot wastes gas.  Pull through spaces whenever possible, or back in.  It may sound illogical, but backing in can actually save you gas as opposed to backing out.  Here’s why: cold engines use more fuel.  If you have to back out after your car’s been parked for a while, it’ll suck up more gas than if you just backed in while the engine is still warm.  Another easy tip: park in the shade.  It’ll decrease the amount of fuel lost to evaporation and require less a/c when you get back in the car.

Of course, there are those instances when you’re unfamiliar with the parking situation in the immediate area of your destination.   Those are the times when, no matter how good your intentions, it can take a while of driving around to find a spot.  Well, if you live in the Chicago area, you’re in luck.  A site called ChicagoParkingMap.com will save you a lot of time, headaches, cursing and waving your fist, and of course gas.

The Chicago Parking Map website is loaded with features that make finding spots adjacent to your destination as easy as possible.  Choose the general area you’re headed to – say, downtown, O’Hare airport or the Museum of Science and Industry – and it displays a map full of little ‘P’ icons that indicate parking areas.  Click on the ‘P’ closest to your destination to get details on the lot including cost, payment methods accepted, hours of operation and where the street entrances and exits are.  Some even tell you how many spots are in the lot, so you can gauge how likely it is to be full when you arrive. Does it get any simpler?

This is the kind of smart planning we’d love to see more of.  Many cities have parking maps online, but none are anywhere near as robust and easy to use as Chicago Parking Map.  If every city had such a website, we could all save a lot of hassle and fossil fuels.

Sure, the gas money you save using these parking methods won’t send you on a vacation to Europe or anything, but it will definitely add up enough to be worth it, especially when you consider the impact on the environment and our resources!

National Speed Limit Could Save Millions of Barrels of Gas

If anything could keep speed demons from screaming down the highway at 85 mph, maybe it’s gas prices. Each 5 mph you drive over 60 is like paying an extra $0.30 per gallon for gas. Considering that slower speeds could save a sizable amount of gas, lawmakers like Senator John Warner (R-VA) and Representative Jacki Speier (D-CA) are calling for a 55-mph national speed limit, similar to the one set in the 1970’s during a previous gas crisis.

From Yahoo! News:

The National Maximum Speed Limit of 55 mph was created in 1974, when Richard Nixon signed the Emergency Energy Highway Conservation Act. Prior to that, states had been free to set their own speed limits, but the new law threatened to strip Federal highway funding from any state straying above the national standard. The ostensible purpose of this limit was to keep down gas prices, which had been driven through the roof by an OPEC embargo touched off by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. And with gas-prices once again sky-high, Warner isn’t alone in talking up a cap on speeding.

Jackie Speier, a first-term Democratic congresswoman from California, is already on the case. Earlier this month, she introduced a bill that would cap highway speed limits at 60 mph - 65 in rural areas. It’s currently awaiting a hearing before the House Committee on Transportation. Warner says he hasn’t contacted Speier, but adds that he’d be willing to “stroll out on the floor” in favor of a speed-limit bill. He has yet to propose a similar bill in the Senate.

A congressional study showed that the1974 law resulted in a savings of 167,000 barrels of petroleum a day, and the volume would be even greater now that there millions more cars on the road.

Of course, there’s always the question of whether motorists will comply. This is a nation of people who feel entitled to doing whatever they want, regardless of the consequences. Sure, lower speed limits – if people actually followed them – could not only save gas, but make the roads safer for all of us. Unfortunately, most people just don’t care. Those of us who do, though, will happily drive 55 mph and enjoy the extra money in our pockets.

Link [Yahoo! News]
Photo credit: PhotopediaPhotos

‘Pulse and Glide’ to Save Gas

A group of five ‘efficiency aficionados’ drove an unmodified 2nd generation Toyota Prius to a fuel economy record of 109.3 miles per gallon over 1397 miles in Pittsburg, PA using a driving technique they call ‘pulse and glide’. This was in 2006, but many people still don’t know about ‘pulse and glide’ and how it can save them gas – even if they’re not driving a hybrid. It could cut down on pollution, too, due to decreased emissions while the car is in neutral.

From Metrompg.com:

Pulse and glide works like this: let’s say you’re on a road where you want to go 60 km/h. Instead of driving along at a steady 60, you instead accelerate to 70 (that’s the pulse), and then coast in neutral with the engine off down to 50 (that’s the glide). That’s it. Rinse and repeat. And repeat. And repeat…

By doing this, you’re still averaging 60 km/h, but it turns out that pulse and glide is significantly more efficient than driving along maintaining a steady 60 km/h.

Metrompg.com put the technique to the test in a Geo Metro, modifying the technique to eliminate the ‘turning the engine off’ part, since that wouldn’t be practical – he just put the car in neutral during the ‘glide’ part. (If you’re not familiar with hybrids, the engine shuts off automatically when you lift of the accelerator).

With the engine idling, and the car in neutral, the average mpg shown on the ScanGauge in the glide down from 90-70 km/h was 550 mpg. When you average that against the 34 mpg of the pulse, it works out to an average of 64 mpg. Now we’re at an 8% increase over the steady-state mpg.

I would name the difference between the two techniques “full” pulse & glide (neutral, with engine off in the glide) vs. “mild” (neutral, with engine idling in the glide).

So, now you know the next time you find yourself cruising down a lonely road at a steady speed, you’re not getting the best mileage you could. You could be pulsing & gliding to maintain the same average speed, and saving lots of fuel in the process.

This technique isn’t always practical in real-world driving; it’s best for those long lonely roads where they’re aren’t many other cars around. Of course, it’s all a bit more complicated than the summary above - get all the details at Metrompg.com.

Link [Metrompg.com]

FuelFrog Makes It Easy To Keep Track Of How Much You’re Being Bent Over At The Pump

I’ve recently caught the hyper-miler bug. Hyper-milers drive their cars in a way that eeks out crazy high milage, sometimes upwards of 100 miles per gallon with non-hybrid cars. Hyper-milers accelerate slowly, using a feather touch on the gas and try to keep all momentum going- hitting the brakes is a waste of speed and a waste of gas. Drafting on big rigs on the highway can squeeze in a few percentage points of efficiency and the really serious hyber-milers look for places to turn off their engines to coast, which is actually not a smart idea- the power steering and braking in modern cars shut down when you turn it off, dropping into neutral is a slightly less efficient but way more safe technique.

FuelFrog is a web app that easily keeps track of your gas mileage- a hyper-milers dream come true, and pretty damn cool for the rest of you too. It’s super simple to use- you just enter in the miles traveled since your last fill up and the amount and price of the gas you got. After a few fillups FuelFrog gives you stats on how much road you’re getting out of your gas in an easy to read web 2.0y graph. I just signed up for my account (as you can see above) so my graph has no data to populate yet.

You can enter the information in via the web or by using Twitter, which would allow you to do it as you are at the station paying. That’s a great feature for those of us who would suck at faithfully entering in the info back at home.

I love seeing stuff like this- great mashups of green, technology, mobile devices, and the internet. Maybe we can work ourselves out of the eco-hole we’ve dug into.

Link [FuelFrog] via [ReadWriteWeb]