Seeing Where You've Been

There's an article in the summer issue of Mazda's "Zoom Zoom" magazine that describes some of the ways the test to determine how well driver's see around them, and how easily they are able to gather information from inside of the car, with the goal of minimizing the time spent not looking ahead. This means being able to gather information from inside and around the car faster. It's good to know they're thinking about that sort of thing.

I suppose that's why many cars now come with "blind spot" mirrors, the small part of the external mirrors that is angled further out, to help the driver to know what's to the sides of the vehicles. It's amazing, now that I think of it, that there was only an outside mirror on the driver's side of most cars until the early 1980s.

There's a technique for adjusting your mirrors that for years has served me well, allowing me to completely eliminate the blind spots and to do without the extra mirrors. You can read about it on the Car and Driver website. Essentially, the goal is to point the outside mirrors away from the car, rather than straight down the sides as most people do. When the mirrors look straight back, you see much of the same thing that your inside mirror shows. The technique I've used as a starting point is to move my head over toward the window and aim the mirror straight back from that vantage point, then to move my head as far right as possible and do the same thing with the right side mirror. When you move back to the center, you have the mirrors set so that any car passing you on either side will move into the side mirror as it moves out of the rear-view mirror. This isn't precise, however, so you have to make adjustments. If done properly, cars passing you will not move out of the view of the side mirror until they have begun to move into your peripheral vision. Voila! No blind spot!

But manufacturers are still putting the blind spot mirrors on the outside mirrors, and it turns out to be a necessity. With the HHR I just bought, I realized very quickly that the view out the back is narrow. Besides the wide edges of the hatch making the window smaller, the rear-seat headrests obscure a lot of the view. This means that I have to aim the outside mirrors more directly back, because I still want vehicles disappearing from the rear-view to show up immediately in the outside mirrors. The result is a restricted side view. So I solved the problem:

I solved it by adding convex blind-spot mirrors. The hard part is getting used to looking in them.

What Does the Computer Know?

When I was growing up, my parents kept a small notebook in both cars where the odometer reading and fuel purchased were recorded, along with oil changes and other maintenance items. We always, always, always filled the tank. By recording the fuel usage and calculating the mileage, you might notice because of a sudden drop that something was wrong, even before you had any other signs. And I suppose it's just something that people used to do. Driving wasn't always a hop-in-the-car-and-go affair, and perhaps keeping the log was a leftover from the early days of motoring. I still have the note pad that was used for a couple of the cars.

After I got married, I dropped the practice, largely because my wife didn't participate. That was one of the first times I realized that just because my family had always done something, that didn't mean it was strictly necessary. Even though I quit logging it, I almost always fill up, and calculate the mileage if the vehicle had been filled up the last time. With the Traverse, it isn't always possible to fill up because one gas station I go to stops at $50.00, and depending on the price, that may not be quite a full tank.

The Traverse is the second car we've had that calculates your mileage for you. The calculation is made based on fuel flow rate and speed. The first car that did this was the '85 Corvette, the first car we had with any sort of computer-driven display. I seem to recall it being fairly accurate, and I've had people tell me that their experience is that the computer is accurate. I've been checking it closely in the '06 HHR that I bought  few weeks ago, and the computer doesn't do such a good job.

The results from the first five complete tanks are as follows:

Miles/gallons = mpg; computer est.
433.9/15.6 = 27.8; 27.4 (not far off)
371.2/14.4 = 25.8; 27.9 (more in-town on this one)
404.3/14.4 = 28.1; 28.9 (more highway on this tank, since I drove to my parents' house)
412.6/14.9 = 27.7; 27.9 (close again)
382.3/14.1 = 27.1; 28.5

I don't know what happened on that last tank, unless it was excessive stop-and-go traffic. But the computer guessed high.

I was really hoping to get around 30.0 miles per gallon with this car. I got 33 with the air conditioner in the Saturn, and 36 without. Maybe in a few weeks I'll be able to see what this car does when I don't need the a/c in the mornings. However, this car has a 16.5 gallon tank, so I can easily go over 400 miles on a tank. The Saturn would give me 400 miles without the a/c, but in the summer time, 400 miles was really pressing my luck.

Later, I'll post regarding the effect of using the air conditioner versus having the windows open. Believe it or not, that's a controversial subject.

Delays, or Non-delays!

A commuting tool that I didn't mention in my last post is the weather website. That radar picture can be your best friend. Depending on your perspective of time, it hasn't been many years that instant radar images have been at our disposal. I suppose it's really been at least 10 years now, so maybe that does count as having been awhile.

This afternoon a guy in the office announced rather suddenly that he was headed out the door... he had checked the radar and a line of thunderstorms was very near. Fortunately for him, he lived the way it was headed, not where it had already been. I elected to hang around awhile, since the storms were between work and home, but there have been times when I've left early because I knew storms were coming. Wrecks occasionally cause the commute to be a headache, but strong storms almost guarantee it.

Today, though, the radar warning was for naught. Somehow, the storms fizzled. All of the reds and oranges faded suddenly, and it didn't leave a drop at the office. There had been rain along the way, and there had been quite a bit at my house, but even that didn't seem to slow the traffic a bit. Quite a pleasant surprise!

And my lawn is happy, too.

Commuting Tools

It may seem a bit silly to think of needing special "tools" to drive to work and back, even if your drive is long. In fact, you can make that commute with nothing but a reliable car, but there are things that can make the commute more pleasant, and even easier or quicker.

Air conditioning, heat, and a radio are basic. I've spent summers without functioning air conditioning, and in this part of the country, with a long commute, that's miserable. I'd like to say that a heater isn't really necessary here, but the one winter I spent without one was pretty cold, especially since I ended up being out after dark quite a bit that year, not something I usually have to do in my "work car". The radio is what makes the commute a good part of the day for me, as it's really the only time I get to listen to music.

I have a couple of recently acquired "tools" that help the commute in other ways. One is a solar-charged bluetooth hands-free unit. It sticks on the windshield with suction cups and keeps itself charged. It was easy to pair with my phone, and it sounds... it sounds okay. I've had a bluetooth headset that sounded very good, but occasionally I'd have to take it in the house and charge it, and the battery might run down at inconvenient times. Of course, I don't use the phone much in the car, perhaps once or twice a week for about 3 to 5 minutes, just to figure out where to meet my wife for dinner. Having the hands-free device keeps me from having to fiddle with the phone when she calls.

Another tool doesn't go in the car at all. It's the "traffic website". I can check the Houston Transtar weather map for a quick view, and used this website for several years. More recently, I've found traffic dot com to provide a better service. I've saved several "drives" on the site comprising the various routes I may take to and from work, and it shows me the delay and total travel time for each route. This helps me decide very quickly whether to follow my usual route or to choose one of the alternates.



More recently, I bought a Garmin Nuvi 255WT GPS unit specifically for commuting. How odd does that sound? Don't I know the way to the office after 16 years? Well, yes, but I've seldom ventured off of the freeways, and since there are limited ways to get back on the Interstate after getting off, having the Nuvi has allowed me to find some new ways around traffic jams. More importantly, though (and the reason I got it), it has a lifetime traffic subscription.

I had doubts about how well this would work after reading online reviews, but my brother purchased one and assured me that it works quite well. In the couple of months I've had it, I've been amazed at how well it works. The traffic receiver is built into the lighter plug cable. Once turned on, it begins gathering local traffic information via Clear Channel Radio's FM traffic network. This model came with a free, lifetime traffic subscription, though some models may require a subscription. Certain XM and Sirius satellite systems have traffic services, as well.

Once it gathers the information, it tells you the estimated total delay on your route (two minutes in the image on the left), and color codes the delays along your route. You can see a very slow (red) section in this image that begins just before the entrance ramp, and that turns to "slow" (yellow) shortly afterward. Because it does take some time, it doesn't always have all of the information by the time I reach the freeway in the afternoon. For this reason, I always check traffic.com to make a decision about my route. In the morning, however, it's generally 15 or more minutes before I encounter traffic, so the Nuvi saves me from having to turn on a computer to check the traffic before I leave the house. If there's a major delay, it directs me to take loop 610 instead of staying on I-10 all the way to my exit, making the decision easy. The traffic signs on the freeway typically have not been that reliable.

And, as I mentioned before, it has allowed me (encouraged me, actually) to get off of the freeway in the downtown area to avoid traffic jams. If it "discovers" a problem on the route you're taking, it announces "severe traffic ahead; recalculating" and tells you which exit to take. While you must still use your own judgment, based on your experience as to what traffic normally does along your route, I've heeded it's instructions and saved myself 30 minutes or more on several occasions. That's a quick payback, in my opinion.

Speaking of using your own judgment, I have followed its instructions with doubts a couple of times. One of those times, it led me to a long wait on a train. There's its biggest drawback: It doesn't know what's happening off of the freeways. It will often direct me to remain on the frontage road through several lights before entering the freeway in the afternoon, but I know that if I stay in the right lane of the freeway I'll get home more quickly than if I deal with the backup at the traffic lights. It also doesn't know about entrance ramps that are closed temporarily due to construction. But it's a tool, and must be used properly, not blindly, and it truly has saved me a great deal of time in the short time I've been using it.

It also gives me a glimpse of the future... someday, and if the current state of the art is any indication, that someday isn't far off, we'll have routing information that takes all of the traffic, on and off highway into account, and will be smart enough to route different cars different ways, saving us all a lot of time and gasoline. Two years ago, I would not have believed we'd really have a device that gave us real-time traffic in our cars. Most exciting gadget I've bought in a while!

Why Would Anyone Choose to Drive to Work?

The general impression I get when reading comments on the web is that most people think that the automobile is a scourge on humanity, and that the only reasons a person would drive to work rather than take public transportation is if they have no choice, or they're Neanderthals. Since I haven't seen any Neanderthals lately, except in Geico commercials, we'll have to assume that people have no choice.

Well, that's mostly true in the U.S. But given the choice, what would it be? According to a 2005 ABC poll, 60% of drivers like their commute. Why would we choose this way of getting to work above other choices, like living close enough to walk, or living near enough to use public transportation? The online "screaming" about it seems to be coming from a very, very vocal minority of social engineers and common people who think they know better than the majority, the masses being sheep that have been led astray by a General Motors Corporation who forces their products on the public rather than letting us choose.

According to the Wikipedia article on 'Commuting', and quoted elsewhere on the web (but unsubstantiated, as far as I can tell), "Before the 19th century most workers lived less than an hour's walk from their work." This idea seems to be quoted in some places with the idea in mind that it's only proper that we live no more than a couple of miles from our place of business, but it strikes me that "one hour" seems to, historically, be about the maximum an average person would want to spend getting to and from work. Longer than an hour, it becomes tedious.


According to The Encyclopedia of Chicago, it was the availability of public transportation that allowed people to live further from their places of business or labor. It was Henry Ford, who drastically cut the cost of manufacturing automobiles, and who subsequently raised employee pay to $5 per day (thus enabling his assembly line workers to afford to buy the very automobiles they were making), who changed commuting forever. But still, don't most of us live less than an hour from our workplace, measured by our chosen mode of transportation?


Houston has a relatively new light rail system. This system has not increased commuting options, but, rather, replaced some bus routes. I've said before that if the trains would run along the freeways, out to where the car drivers live, and stop at the freeway exits, where people could catch a bus to their workplaces, you might get a few people out of their cars. But they don't work that way. The trains compete with car traffic downtown. (Back in the 1980s, Mayor Whitmire proposed a monorail system that would have placed the trains above ground, where they would not hit or be hit by automobiles, as happens now.) If I want to use public transportation on my daily commute, I must first drive 7 miles to the park-and-ride location, then take a bus downtown, walk a couple of blocks, and catch another bus that takes me close to the office. Total time from the first pickup to the last drop off is 91 minutes, plus 8 more minutes for the initial drive, and 5 for the final walk. That's 1 hour and 45 minutes to get to work.... far beyond what people have historically considered to be acceptable. Additionally, the bus fares would run $11.50 per day, versus the $6.37 I'm spending on gasoline right now. While we really should add in the other costs of operating the car, most of those are fixed, whether the car is driven to the park-and-ride or driven all the way to work.


Does this mean I have no other options? Well, at this point in my life, I could move closer to work, though when the kids were at home, the Houston Independent School District would not have been an option. A smaller, older home for the price of our larger, newer home doesn't seem like a reasonable trade, but you do pay a price for living nearer the city center. And I'd still be driving.


Would we actually choose to do this? There are other reasons for our choices. Moving closer to work means moving further from our parents, and we expect to be spending more and more time with them over the next few years. That may be the deal-breaker, because it would mean that my wife has to drive 2 hours to get to her parent's home, rather than just over an hour, and that will soon be a weekly (or more often) trip.


Remember that statistic I quoted at the beginning: Most people actually enjoy their commutes. When construction in multiple places isn't throwing a monkey wrench into the works, I enjoy mine. It's 1-1/2 hours I have each day to listen to music on the radio. When else can I listen to music? And it's virtually the only time I've ever alone. Do I really want to give that up? Commuting by car is my hobby.


Besides, if I wouldn't have had my 36 mile drive today, I'd have missed this 1955 Oldsmobile 88 that some lucky guy was hauling home to restore.

Face it... we also commute by car because we're car crazy.