bumping up the price of gas
May 10th, 2007 | Published in general
It’s not obvious from anything on this page, but the genesis of the blog is really my own bike mileage tracker, conveniently located at the top of this domain. When i got back into regular cycling and biking to work a couple of years ago, i thought a good way to encourage myself and track my progress would be to have an easy way to log my miles. Traditionally, people have used a notepad and pencil or maybe and Excel spreadsheet. Being resistant to monopolization and a hopeless web geek, i instead wrote my own with PHP and MySQL.
One of the early features of the app was a way to have it track commuting miles ridden -vs- fun or training rides, and an automatic calculation of the gas and money saved by doing so. The gas price portion of it is a pretty crude (ha!) setup really, just a number set in the preference file. If i were to be really careful about it, i’d find some online source of current local gas prices and log that with every entry. It would be interesting actually, since i could graph the prices over time. But so far i’ve been too lazy for that.
For quite a while now, the price in my bikelog has been $2.60/gallon, which is more or less where it hovered for several months. Now with the coming of spring, it’s bouncing along just under $3.00/gallon locally. Of course, there are places in the country where it’s already rather above $3.
As an aside, it’s also interesting to note that (at least around here) gas is around $0.10 more a gallon than diesel. Given that diesel engines get around 40% better mileage, all those VW TDI drivers must have little secret grins every time they have to stop at the pumps.
As of today, i have biked 762 miles, 563 of which were commuting miles that might otherwise have been car trips. Our car gets 25mpg average, so i’ve avoided burning 22.5 gallons of gas. Under the old price scheme, that save me $58.53. With the new, improved gas pricing, i’ve saved $66.40.
I’m not walking around with $66.40 in my pocket these days, but it’s nice to watch that number ratchet up a bit every day. Since i’ve spent less than $66.40 on my bike this year, so far i’d say i’m ahead of the game.