Cost of Driving to Work
I am still unsure of whether it makes sense or not to drive the back roads to get to work. In order to figure this out, I’m going to run some math.
If I drive the toll roads, I have to pay $1.50 off the bat. My truck gets 14 mpg city and 18 mpg highway. The length of the trip is 21.2 miles, with 13.6 of those miles bing pure highway driving (with no traffic). Roughly %64 of the drive is highway. Totaling this up, I get .75 gallons of gas for the highway, and .54 gallons of gas for the city. If I use $3.00 as the price of a gallon of gas, the total comes to $2.25 (highway) plus $1.64 (city) plus $1.50 tolls, giving me a grand total of $5.39. If I drive this both ways, each day will total $10.78.
If I drive the back roads, there are no tolls, and it is a little bit shorter of a drive. The total distance is 18.5 miles and there are some stretches where there aren’t any traffic lights, so I would say %10 is actually more like highway driving. 1.85 miles on the highway, and 16.65 miles in the city. This equates to .1 gallons on the highway and 1.19 gallons for the city. Gas for the highway is $.30 and $3.57 for the city, totaling $3.87. If I drive this both ways, it comes out to $7.74.
There you have it, it is actually cheaper to drive the back roads. Of course this doesn’t count the extra time (although it’s not worth much anyways I spend in the car.
Over the course of the year, I could save approx $760 by only driving the back roads.