that which rolls

I am considering proposing a “Bike, Bus, or Carpool” program at work. I am now on the recycling committee and on this committee recycling also means planting trees, organizing earth day, and any other ‘green’ activity the campus might partake in. Mostly I just want to get people to think about getting to work without a car once in a while as a possibility. At the very least I want to do something somewhat official for National Bike to Work Week. There are some people in the area trying to organize a Bike to Work Week in Rochester. Maybe I can hook up with them somehow.

More on all that later…

While I was hunting around for information & ideas to propose,I found this calculator that shows you “The True Cost of Driving.” You basically put in the number of miles in your daily round trip commute and it spits back a number that tells you your annual cost of driving. It calculates both your personal costs and costs to society (maintaining roads, etc.) but even if I zero out the societal costs the personal cost to me is still huge.

I did some exciting math and found out that 68 of the days I work each year are just to earn the money to get to work. That’s almost 14 weeks which is over 26% of my time.

If I think of it from a daily perspective, almost 2 hours of each day I’m working to pay for my transportation to and from work on that same day.

By comparison, if I were to take the bus, it would cost me about $750 a year. It costs me more in time because it takes at least an extra hour for me to get to and from work by bus.

Anyway, I know my math is kind of slushy here but I plan to make it a bit more solid and have Brian check my work before I make any wild and crazy arguments in a meeting.

Thanks for listening while I talk to myself.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 19th, 2008 at 10:46 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.