Day 50 - A WCYDWT Moment?

In terms of creativity or know-how, I'm definitely just starting out in coming up with intriguing ideas and concepts to teach on. However, when I was filling the gas tank a few hours ago, and lamenting the fact that my MPG is down the toilet*, a plausible 'What Can You Do With That?' moment struck me. Everyone knows that the difference between highway vs. city driving is tremendous. As a for instance, in my tracking of MPG, my 2003 Malibu has a high of 32 MPG (on a tank that made a trip to/from college, with almost no driving that wasn't >50 MPH) and a low of 17 MPG (when I was student teaching in St. Louis and got stuck in traffic every day for a week).

That said, I started wondering what kind of in-city driving differences make that great of an impact? Is it a stop-and-go type issue, a problem of driving at very low speeds for prolonged periods of time? There are a million factors that seemingly go into it (based on my research over the past few years):

• temperature
• tire traction
• amount of air in tires
• weather (rain, snow, ice)
• acceleration/deacceleration style of the driver (slam on the brakes vs. gradual)
• travel speed
• prolonged stoppage

However, my question becomes this: could a person break down exactly how much they lose in MPG based on their stoppage time? Could you sit in a vehicle and run a stop watch for every milli-second you find yourself sitting at a stoplight, 4 way stop, left turn lane, or stuck in traffic, and find a way to project how many MPG you would lose due to that time? Some of the factors I mentioned would be accounted for (same person/vehicle being tracked, traction and air), and other factors (temperature and speed) would be accounted for in data collection, along with distance, MPG and stoppage time.

I'm going to try it, despite the fact that I still haven't quite figured out how to organize the data. I would start with the very next time I go out in my car. The decision is two-fold:

1. As you can see, I've only gone 10 miles since I filled the tank. The logical side of me says that this wouldn't skew the data tremendously.
2. Since I filled the tank, by my count I've been through 15 stoplights, 6 stop signs and 4 parking lots, all during a high traffic volume time of day (roughly 11:30AM - 1PM). The math/data purist in me knows that this is already a large amount of stop and go.

I might just start timing it anyway to see if I can play with some data and figure out a way to make it work for me. I might need some help though, or another person or two willing to undertake keeping a stopwatch in their vehicle constantly to collect data.

Any takers, or is this not a plausible undertaking?

*My current problem with MPG is based on the fact that ALL of my current driving is in-city, I only have a 5 minute commute, which gives my car little-to-no time to warm up before I arrive at my destination, and I live in Wisconsin, where it's really freakin cold.