I always like to analyze articles like this to see if the math they propose makes any sense. OK, I'm a geek, I know it.
The one thing that always happens is they don't give you quite all the information and so you have to make some assumptions. they say that Canadites idle their cars for an average of 5 to 10 minutes a day, and this is 75 million minutes a day. Which, if you take the low end of 5 minutes a day, implies 15 million cars in Canada, which seems kind of low to me. If you take the higher number of 10 minutes a day, you get even fewer cars. anyway, they say if you cut the amount of idle time by 5 minutes a day per car, so we are assuming dropping the average from 5 to 0 minutes, they would save 680 million liters of gas. OK, so you cut from 75 million minutes a day to 0 minutes a day. multiply that out by days per year to get total minutes. Divide by 60 to get hours. So you are saving 456.25 million hours of idle time a year. Divide the 680 million liters of gas savings by 456.25 million hours and you get 1.5 liters per hour, or about 0.393 gallons per hour. So, here is where I run out of real world knowledge. Does a vehicle really burn about 0.4 gallons per hour while at idle? It seems kind of high, but I really don't know. It could be kind of low. If a car gets 30 miles per gallon, 0.393 gallons would get you 11.8 miles. So, idling is the same as driving your car at about 12 miles per hour. what do the car guys say? -- Blue skies. Dan Rossi Carnegie Mellon University. E-Mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tel: (412) 268-9081
