In the South SF Bay Area, our pickup truck gets 13 mpg mixed freeway/city.
Doing 75-80 on flat land, or 65-70 over the Sierra Nevadas, it gets 24 mpg. With city traffic in other cities it gets 18 mpg.
The reason it is so bad here is that the environmental activists passed traffic quiescence laws that try to discourage people to drive by making the roads worse.
Of course, they don’t make obvious fixes to improve public transit, and the bike lane “improvements” they put in are mostly textbook “how to kill bicyclists” designs that European countries phased out decades ago.
Here are two classic favorites: concrete barriers that are too close to the curb to allow street sweeping, and adding bike lanes between parallel parking spots and the sidewalks.
They must have realized people started re-routing their trips to avoid stoplights unless they were making right turns, since they’ve also started erecting barriers or adding red arrows to make it impossible to make right turns on red.
Anyway, this wastes time, but it also costs us at least $100 a month on gasoline. Our primary car is an EV.
Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
> Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.
sure, but I'd rather just lobby against cars at that point. Especially in a place like the Bay Area that should be mostly served by public transit and dense housing. Lobbying to micromanage idling just feels like a waste of effort for such a negligible benefit.
Doing 75-80 on flat land, or 65-70 over the Sierra Nevadas, it gets 24 mpg. With city traffic in other cities it gets 18 mpg.
The reason it is so bad here is that the environmental activists passed traffic quiescence laws that try to discourage people to drive by making the roads worse.
Of course, they don’t make obvious fixes to improve public transit, and the bike lane “improvements” they put in are mostly textbook “how to kill bicyclists” designs that European countries phased out decades ago.
Here are two classic favorites: concrete barriers that are too close to the curb to allow street sweeping, and adding bike lanes between parallel parking spots and the sidewalks.
They must have realized people started re-routing their trips to avoid stoplights unless they were making right turns, since they’ve also started erecting barriers or adding red arrows to make it impossible to make right turns on red.
Anyway, this wastes time, but it also costs us at least $100 a month on gasoline. Our primary car is an EV.
Anyway, around here, even a small investment in reducing idling (or just cutting funding for traffic quiescence projects) would be equivalent to increasing vehicle fuel economy by something like 20-80%.