Gas, You and our Congress

4. August 2008 by Patrick Budowski.

If they were every going to get serious about saving gas, it would start with the Federal employees. Not all federal employees can take mass transit, in the area I live in few do outside of D.C. It gets used but only by those who have to use it. Drive in would be to long, or they live right on one of the lines.

What the Feds could do is start working 4 10 hour days. Of course this could not be everyone, and some people would get mad, have to work Friday or Monday while most of the other folks are off. However tough luck. Most of of the office’s could do this. From the FBI to Congress. Now I am not saying take the police or the agents off, since they are more then likely working more the 10 hours a day now. I am talking about the staff. Instead of having 300 people on the phones for the IRS 5 days a week, lets cut down to 200 a day. If each person could have one day off during the week. That would cut 300 trips to work each week. Before I forget, I am not talking about shutting down offices or services. They would still be open 5 days a week or whatever their normal work days are now.Take 4 days and work 10 hours on those days.

Lets make the math simple. Since there are a ton of variables, let just say the average car gets 20 mpg. Since a lot these trips you are stuck in traffic. Round trip to work and home is 100 miles, you get 20 mpg and work 5 days a week. 500 miles each week. That’s 25 gallons a week. Lets say gas cost $4 even, means you spend $100 on gas.
Now take my plan ( I am sure some one much smarter then me has thought of this) Now you are driving 400 miles a week. Cost of fuel $80 each week. Doing this way save you $20 per week, or $ 1040 per year.

Now that’s not bad an extra grand each year, but wait I have not shown you the big picture yet. You now have an office that was burning 390,000 gallons of gas each year down to 312,000 gallons a year. Saving 78000 gallons per year. Now this is only one office. I also left those that could work from home 4 days a week and only go into the office one day a week, off of this. Like I said earlier there are so many variables
Someone much smarter then me should do the math, since its 5:30 am here, and I have been up since 2 am.
This plan IMO is much better then to just go on vacations which is what congress did. House side at least, the Senate is playing games so they open up, sort of every 3 days.

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