Are you ready to join the ranks of the hypermilers? Now that gas prices are so high, it’s a good time to try.
Hypermiling is a modern sport whereby one attempts to get the maximum possible gas mileage.
Check out Hypermiling.com and wikipedia for some good gas sipping suggestions.
Also, can you prevent traffic waves? An electrical engineer in Seattle experiments with “anti-traffic”. (I’ve been doing this in I-65 S evening traffic for years). At least it gives you something challenging to do on the way. Just be prepared to piss a few people off who are right behind you and can’t wait to get to the bumper of the car stopped up ahead. One lesson, leave plenty of gaps for merging traffic.
Suppose we push constantly ahead, change lanes to grab a bit of headway, and always eliminate our forward space in order to prevent other drivers from “cutting us off”. If tiny traffic waves appear, we will rush ahead and then brake hard, leaving larger waves behind us. Repeated action causes the waves to grow huge. Ironic that the angry people who push ahead as fast as possible might unwittingly participate in “amplifying” the very conditions that they hate so much. The solution seems obvious: drivers with a smooth “calm” style will tend to damp out the waves and produce a uniform flow… and the few drivers who intentionally drive at a single constant speed will wipe out the waves entirely.
Minneapolis uses traffic lights on interstate on-ramps to smooth the flow of traffic on the highway and to keep traffic flowing at on-ramps.