Inspired by Catherine, I decided to check the walk score of my new neighborhood.
I’m disappointed that my new neighborhood only has a Walk Score of 42 – especially since Catherine has managed to move to a neighborhood with a 95/100 score. Amazingly, my parents’ house – in the middle of a tiny town with only three stoplights (all off by 9pm) received a 40. Then again, we walked around quite a bit in the summertime when we lived there. Personally, I wish they would add a Bike Score application to the site, easily enough if they just expand the parameters a few miles. I think anything within 5 miles is very bike-able, and even if it were just 3 miles my score would be closer to the 90s. My old house in Northampton, MA got an 83/100 – how I miss living in Northampton, and never having to get into my car to run errands.
In addition to riding my bike to work, recently I have stopped speeding. This may have soemthing to do with the $100 speeding ticket I received in Springfield two weeks ago, but after driving around at or below the speed limit, I realized that my truck went from getting 21MPG to 31MPG. Imagine that! Just by dropping my speed 15MPH, I increased the range of my gas tank by 140 miles. I challenge everyone to drop down to at least the legal speed limit, if not 5MPH less than – not only will you be helping to slightly reduce our dependence on foreign oil, you will be saving yourself serious money.
For example, last year I put 28,000 miles on my truck. At 21MPG, I purchased 1,333 gallons of gas over the course of the year. Had I been driving slower and making 31MPG, I would have only needed to purchase 903 gallons of gas. At current prices, that would have saved me $1,741.
Continuing on in this vein, I now live only 4 miles from my place of employment (5 miles by bike). I used to live 25 miles from my place of employment – forsaken out in suburbia! Most people I work with live in suburbia, one person in my group actually lives in Rhode Island and has been commuting to Hartford for over ten years is now paying over $1,000/month in gas! Just think, if you moved closer to where you worked, how much money you would save in gas. Last year, I drove 12,500 miles to and from work (not counting visits to our other plants). At $4.05/gallon, at 21MPG, that means I spent $2,410 on gas – just getting to and from work! Now, if I actually drove my car to work every day from where I currently live, that would be 2,000 miles of driving, which at the same gas mileage would cost me $385 in gas for the year. So now I’ll have (at least) $2,025 extra money in my bank account, just by virtue of living closer to work.
Now just think, if you ride your bike or walk to work, you’ll get about a billion miles to the gallon, plus maybe save some gym time.