Mileage and Skewed Stats

Jen asked me a question the other day. She asked, "When we car pool, are we really saving that much money?"

Sure we are. We worked up an idea to track our mileage on a day we car pool and then compare it to the mileage when we don't car pool.

Sounds easy, right?

Nope.

On Tuesday I zeroed the trip odometer in the mini-van. I drove Jen to work, then went to my work. Then after I got out I went back to Jen's office and got her. This is where you would expect me to say that we went home, but no. This is the part of the story where the stats get skewed. We took a bit of a detour to my parent's house to pick up the blue car, which had spent the previous day in the shop, and then went home. So the round trip was actually longer than it would have been on an ordinary car-pooling day.

Odometer Reading: 88.7 miles

Then on Wednesday I zeroed the trip odometer again and drove to work and back without any detours.

Odometer Reading: 77.0 miles

A difference of 11.7 miles.

The other reason I call this data skewed is... well... I don't know how long Jen's trip to and from the office was. There is also the small issue of her picking up the kids in the evening which adds quite a bit to her trip as well. I can say this with full confidence though: Her round trip to work and back without any additional stops is a whole lot more than 11.7 miles. So yes, my love, we are saving gas money and miles by car pooling.

There is also another bit of commuting that gets tacked on to my trips a couple of days a week. On the days when the kids wake up at our house I drive them to their dad's in the morning and he drives them to school. That means I have to make a drive in the wrong direction for a bit. I tracked the mileage for that route this morning. 51.3 miles. On top of that I sometimes pick them up in the evening too. That would make my round trip that much longer. That really doesn't have any affect on the car pool question, I am just sort of on a roll here and can't stop the data collection. You know how it is.

About a year ago my friend Larry bought one of those Google phones. The G1, not the Droid or the actual Google-made phone the Nexus One. His is the first phone to run the Google Android operating system. I'm not sure who made the hardware. Anyway, given the Googleness of his cell phone, he had an application that ran Google's Latitude. That's the GPS tracking service they have that allows you to see where your friends are while they have the phone on them.

He was telling me about it and we thought it would be cool in a nerdish sort of way to both sign up and friend our accounts. Unfortunately there is no actual application for the iPhone. There is a nice little web app though. I signed up and checked in a few times and that was it. Then I noticed that if I am plugged into the car charger while using the iPod on my phone and open up Safari to the Latitude page it would automatically update itself every three minutes or so (instead of stopping when the phone goes to sleep, which it doesn't do when it is plugged in and running the iPod). That was cool. Pretty much useless to me, but cool. After that I found out that you could opt in to a Latitude history routine that will show a Google map with all of the locations that the app has checked into. You can restrict the display to specific date ranges too. It's silly, and pretty much useless, and it is only viewable to my account. But, it lets me have a picture of just how much ground I cover on a Wednesday morning in February...

Note the one spot in Lawrence was actually my GPS placing me in the wrong spot, making the application even more useless. I kinda like the picture though.

I will update again with the total mileage of my round trip today because I can just tell you're all salivating at the chance to know such important information.

Right?