There Is One Thing That Probably Robs More Fuel Economy From Cars Than Anything Else, Red Lights
posted in General Information |It is a factor that is completely ignored by all. That is something I don’t understand. Think about how much gas you waste a day waiting for red lights to turn green. When you are sitting at a red light, your car is running and you are not moving. You are getting zero miles per gallon for the entire time you are sitting still.Let’s look at how much time you might spend idling at red light. I know it will be different for everyone, depending upon where they live and how much traffic their region has and how much travel is on freeways but let’s make some assumptions just to get an idea about how much gas we are wasting.Assume you have a 30 minute commute to work. Let’s also assume that you spend 5 minutes waiting for lights during the 30 minutes. I think that as a rule that number may be low, but we can use it for this example.Of course you would do the same on your way home. Let’s also assume that you work 7 days a week just to make it easy. Normally you would be spending more time waiting for lights on weekends as you did errands and shopping, but we can ignore that just for the sake of simplicity.10 minutes a day for 365 days would be 3650 minutes. That amounts to approximately 61 hours of idling. 61 hours is the equivalent of two and a half days of idling. Can you imagine letting your car idle for two and a half days? If your commute was more in line with spending 10 minutes each way then it would be like letting your car sit and idle for 5 straight days. No wonder the actual fuel economy numbers on the cars we drive are so low.In