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Wbruff (Bill), posted a comment about how he changed his commute from the freeway to surface streets and reduced his 25yr daily trip from 18 miles to 13.5 miles. The speed limit dropped to 40mph and he makes the commute in the same amount of time. Lately, I found new roads that connected to old roads and started shortening my trips and found less traffic. As I saw other new developments, I wondered if they had ways to shorten my trips and connected to a road that I would prefer. Instead of wasting time and fuel driving to check, I thought I’d go to the map and check.

After going to http://www.mapquest.com/ , I clicked on map and typed in the City and State. You can zoom in to the streets and areas you travel and see by the map, shorter distances and new roads that connect. Mapquest lets you move in any direction (NSEW), to discover you’ve been wasting time and money getting from point A To B. All this time, I thought I knew the short cuts. Just going to the bank, I now know I wasted time and money going to a restaurant from there and that sort of thing. The speed limits are lower much of the time for EV, and I can get there as quick, if not faster.

GaryG

Google Earth is another great tool for doing this sort of thing. It has elevation data, too, so you can see what kind of terrain each option offers.

yep chosing your routes i try to go down more than i go up, even if the path is farther, but with the engine off who cares ;)!

actually now that i gave myself some time... think about this...

if you choosed a distance farther than usual to get home (lets say 3 miles? or 5 km) but the majority of those extra distances you managed to have your engine off to make up the savings. So in techniacally is that kind of cheating? Trying to make up the crappy fuel mileage by finding some road to have some engine off time to make up the average even though it takes a little longer (say 10 min longer) to get home because you decided to turn right instead of going straight home? Sure your distance has increased significantly but if you burned a few extra .1 gallons just to bring up your average up then hmmmmmm

did I explain that right? You guys know what I'm trying to say right?

I've always thougt about fuel efficiency as a trip thing and not a reading on the gauge.

I like to use fuel burned to get from home to work and not miles per gallon. So if my mpg goes up but my fuel burned goes up then its less efficient. The bonus is when you find a route that the mpg goes up enough where it compensates for the extra distance so that the fuel burned actualy goes down.

Does that answer your question ;)

My point was a short cut that reduces miles and finding roads that were better to travel. Example, A road that was extended looked like it went into a development which would dead end. By looking on the map, I found it came out
right near where I was going. For a long time, I had been driving around this development (1 1/2 miles) having to stop at more lights and go higher speeds in heavy traffic, wasting gas. When I took the new road, it was perfect for EV with no stops and no traffic. This new route would have not been found if I didn't go to the map. Haven't you ever found that short cut that the person in front of or behind you is smart and taking advantage of it also?

I agree with Terry, the point is to get to your location and back saving the most fuel. Just look at the map for the best route and try it. It may have less stops and traffic AND BE SHORTER!

GaryG

My post was responding to phil. But yeah. I'll try different routes on occasion to "explore" I'm due to do more exploring because there is one section of my commute that always brings down my mileage. I'm going to look for a way to bypass it.

yes tom thanks! i guess in that sense I can try to pick my routes more carefully.

I like to use fuel burned to get from home to work and not miles per gallon. So if my mpg goes up but my fuel burned goes up then its less efficient. The bonus is when you find a route that the mpg goes up enough where it compensates for the extra distance so that the fuel burned actualy goes down.

I like that idea, that the net effect should be a reduction in fuel consumption for the same trip. Thing is, how do you tell if the increased mpg has offset any extra distance? The only way I can think of is trips per tank. If you used to say, get 10 trips out of your tank with the old route, and now you can drive 12 trips with your new route on the same tank, you can say you're actually using less gas with the new route.

So a "better" route should fit one of these criteria:
a) fewer # miles than before, with same (or higher) FE
b) same # miles as before but with higher FE, or
c) greater # miles with really super FE

Your criteria is correct.

What I do is basicly use my trip odometer to measure miles driven and then use miles/mpg to get fuel use.

Perfect. I knew there had to be a simple, objective formula for this.