I am not going to help you change your miles per gallon. Sorry.
I am going to add a new concept to the whole miles per gallon. Person Miles Per Gallon (PMPG). Let me give you a simple example of PMPG: You drive to work in a car that gets 15 mpg. You drive alone. 15 PMPG. Very simple. Now let’s say you drive with someone else to the same job from the same neighborhood, so there is no other extra driving. 2 X 15 mpg = 30 PMPG.
Another complicated example- every Friday I drive my 16 year old to High School. She is in a special program at a farther high school and the bus ride is about 2 hours one way. We carpool with 4 other girls. So 5 x 15 mpg is 75 PMPG. Of course there is some driving out of the way and I have to drive from work alone from there, so maybe I get 60 PMPG in total.
“This is some fake math you’re doing!” I can hear you screaming at this simple blog. But think about it some more. If there was no carpool, I would have to drive her everyday in the morning. I would spend 5 times more on gas for the same benefit I get now by carpooling.
This same PMPG can also be applied to taking the bus. Let’s say I am going to take the bus to work. And it is a 5 mile drive. At 15 mpg and gas at $3 per gallon, it costs me $2 every day to drive to work and home. If the bus costs $1.50 each way, and $3.00 every day I have a PMPG of 10 mpg. That is not better. Now if I were a great mathematician (and tonight I am not), I would add the cost of parking at $5 and get some monstrously better vPMPG (a virtual PMPG) because I would then be saving money. I am going to guess that it is something like 45 vPMPG. But it is math I cannot figure out. I even tried to use a spreadsheet and make everything a small set of equations that I could then aggregate into something really amazing.
So carpool. Find the local website that will help you with that. Our local one is ridefinders.com. Your community might have a website or just a number to call. Use it. Think of all the gas and cash you will be saving.
And somebody please figure out the vPMPG for me and supply me with a formula to use.
