dan you have to much time on your hands. grin jim At 10:28 AM 2/27/2008, you wrote:
>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:<mailto:dr25%40andrew.cmu.edu>[EMAIL PROTECTED] >Tel:(412) 268-9081 > >No virus found in this incoming message. >Checked by AVG Free Edition. >Version: 7.5.516 / Virus Database: 269.21.1/1301 - Release Date: >2/27/2008 8:35 AM
