Gas wasting tips

May 14, 2008 By Richard Masoner Posted in The Archives Tagged with Commute by Bike

We’ve seen tips on how to save gas all over the place. I like Matt’s stories on wasting gas at his blog. I see stuff like Matt reports all the time, where people leave their engines running for now discernible reason. How about you?

0 thoughts on “Gas wasting tips”

JiMCi says:

May 15, 2008 at 10:58 am

Read on page 2 of Montreal’s La Presse this morning, an article on how high gas prices are changing people’s habit:

Living in the suburbs, a woman mentions that she now uses public transit, an “ecological decision”. In the same breath, she adds that high gas prices have her reconsider the family summer vacations plans: they were going to travel all the way to the southern U.S. states this year and to the Canadian West coast in 2009, pulling a touring caravan…

Question: how many gallons of gas do you need to travel over 4,000 miles pulling a touring caravan?

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Surly Bee-anchi Lady says:

May 15, 2008 at 2:25 pm

In the San Antonio, Texas airport cell phone parking lot, where people can wait in their cars until the passenger they are picking up calls them upon arrival, leaving the car running for the 15, 30, or 45-minutes waiting for the call is normal.

And turning off the a/c when it is 95 degrees or better, which can be 4 of 5 months out of the year, is asking for some discomfort. The airport could make things a bit easier by creating a covered parking area or even putting the lot in or near a shaded area so people could move out of their cars and be a bit cooler waiting on a shaded bench. (I opt for the discomfort and turn off my engine. . .Surly gal that I am).

Our culture seems to encourage waste of natural resources and ignore the true costs of how most in our country choose to live. I have been carrying my own canvas shopping bags to the grocery store for about 20 years, being the Surly weirdo that I am. Now that my local Whole Foods grocery store has quit supplying plastic bags, some people are starting to get the message about the wasteful habit of needing new plastic bags for every shopping trip.

But I digress. To paraphrase something I saw on Stephen Colbert’s show . . . Soon it will be summer everywhere all the time. . . and by that time people really won’t have the gas to waste trying to maintain that 72 degree ambient temperature in their cars! So a solution to wasting gasoline will come, one way or the other.

Riding my Big Dummy to do my errands, being car-free while I’m in town, doesn’t keep me cool, but it does make it easier for me to live with myself. My hope is that gas goes up in price to match what the Europeans have been paying for years. And their cost of gas is reflected in how they use their cars and what types of cars they use.

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Surly Bee-anchi Lady says:

May 15, 2008 at 2:31 pm

Follow up: Now that I have my Big Dummy, and my Footsies arrived today (!), I may not need to opt for turning off my engine in the airport parking lot! Ha. . . wouldn’t that be something!

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Matt@TMW says:

May 15, 2008 at 2:43 pm

Thanks for the link!

These are all, unfortunately, true stories that I’m sure we will all begin to notice more of once the weather starts to warm up.

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Juan says:

May 15, 2008 at 3:06 pm

I see people all the time in front of our grocery store, sitting with the engine runing while their spouse “runs in real quick” to get something. Not to mention the fact that the entire front of the store is a designated “no parking” zone. I have gone in on many occasions and come out to see the same car still sitting there idling, that I saw on the way in. I guess gas isn’t that expensive after all.

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Joe says:

May 15, 2008 at 5:42 pm

Here in Atlanta, we just discovered that at a MARTA (local transit authority) bus depot, over 200 buses are regularly left idling . . . overnight.

Yep, overnight. With no one in them. Not moving.

I kid you not.

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john t says:

May 15, 2008 at 10:57 pm

I have to respone to Joe’s reply. I used to ride by the Tri-met bus barn in Portland Oregon at 3 am and every bus was also running. It made me angry that I had to breathe that filth. I no longer ride there, but I would bet that nothing has changed.

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Gas wasting tips

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