Highway Graffiti and Etiquette

I drive a 2000 Honda Civic. My car is very... zippy and I drive it as such (although the Civic is not so zippy that I'm not perennially tempted to upgrade to a Subaru Impreza manual transmission - which I'm led to believe has the same base engine as the WRX while omitting the highly wasteful Turbo and the derpy rear spoiler). I am not an aggressive or unsafe driver, per se, but for the past three years, I've made it my practice to keep pace with the flow of traffic. In my area of Massachusetts, the "pace," is usually 75-85 mph and I became accustomed to owning the left lane (in Massachusetts, travel in the left lane is prohibited unless you are passing another vehicle).

For those playing at home, I'm also very comfortable driving on the Chicago-area freeways. Was it the Eisenhower or the Dan Ryan where the lights used to be timed so that you started out at 35, but to keep pace with the greens, you slowly accelerated until you ended up going 85? I swear, that light was yellow when I started...

On my last visit to NYC, I was running very late and had to make the 200 mile trip in under than three hours. That's an average speed of 67mph, approximately. However, In order to make up for periods of delay or slower average velocity (such as bouts of in-town driving prior to the highway, or detouring around an accident which closed I-84 in Hartford, CT) I found myself driving rather fast, all the while, keenly aware that my extra speed a) put me at risk of getting a traffic ticket and b) did not make a significant dent in my travel time. It's an illusion that speeding gets you there faster. I know. I spent over an hour watching the relativity of time, speed and distance slip by. Here's how: Early on in my trip, I made up 20 minutes, so that my effective starting time was 10pm. Then I tried to continue to make up time: I sped, and for the next two hours the minutes on my clock were barely outpaced by the numbers clicking by on my trip odometer. While I nervously watched, my progress was tortuously slow. It took something like 15 minutes of speeding to have my odometer gain one minute on the clock.

I'm not sure what the low point of that drive was. It was either counting how many FedEx trucks I passed on my way (7), bagging the OMEGA EXPRESS (which is the last tour bus you'll ever ride through New England), looking out for deer (3) avoiding being pulled over for speeding in Connecticut, or the agonizing tension of pacing my odometer against the clock while listening to Better Than Ezra, over-caffeinated and flashing back to when I was a 13-year-old g0th. Either way, once I got to my destination, I ceased to care about speed or fuel efficiency.

That is... until I spent some time talking to Martin - an old-school nuclear engineer. Well, I suppose he started out as a civil engineer, but when he came to the US, he started building nuclear power plants. His stories were really interesting, but moreso, he was not shy about going off on old-engineer rants about politics, conservation, etc (most of which I enjoyed hearing and wholeheartedly agreed with. I should hope I live to be old enough to go off on rants and tell the kids to get off my lawn.) The relevancy in this tangent is that Martin and his son were giving me directions back to MA when Martin made the comment that I should take the Sawmill Parkway, because it was slower. He said, "If people are so worried about the cost of oil, they should make speeding a crime. Anyone doing 75, ticket them. Everybody speeds. We're wasting 20% of our fuel on speeding!"

That got me to thinking... I had the perfect conditions for an easy experiment. I had come 200 miles on more than half a tank of gas, so now it was time to see whether I could go the same 200 miles back on less than half a tank of gas. I wanted to see if Martin was right (in fact, I'd enjoy proving him right and visiting to give him the actual numbers.) The first data-point was positive, if ballpark -- I got home with a half-gallon of gas to spare, and so began my, "55 to 65 Experiment," or an analysis of the trends in fuel efficiency with respect to average highway speed for a well-maintained 2000 Honda Civic. The rules are simple - I drive the way I always have, but I (or anyone else driving my car) has to adhere to driving the highway speed limit, preferably in the speed band of 55-65pmh (even Connecticut troopers won't bother pulling you over for 7-9mph over the limit), and driving slower as road conditions dictate. It's not exactly easy to drive the speed limit though - everything about highway etiquette changes. For starters, you drop to the lowest level of the roadway hierarchy, and from there, things get a bit nasty.

So far, the only thing preventing me from comparing my four weeks worth of new driving data to the three year log I already have (and declaring a premature win, because I am convinced the savings is at least 10% if not 15%) is the OCD compulsion to only present a complete, defensible experiment. I am so impatient, and that is the real challenge - this experiment is as much about my personal mindfulness as it is about fuel efficiency.

Because I'm not allowing myself to tabulate any results, I now close with some graffiti spotted on a railroad overpass on I-84 E, just past Exit 62 in Connecticut: "Impeach Bush & Cheney. Nixon did less."