Just How Much Is There?

I’m Boggled

I’ve been trying to understand how much oil there is (I know there are other fossil fuels, but oil is the one I’m thinking about right now.)

I live in a rural area of a medium-population center (Albany, New York). I have it lucky with a short six mile commute to work that takes me about fifteen minutes. Here are the fossils of my commute:

Exiting my driveway, I see a school bus in our neighborhood. Almost immediately, I am presented with a class of vehicles which pass every house that has a school age child everywhere in America, twice per day. Every town in every county of every state in the United States has a school bus system operating under this rule. What about other countries around the world? Increasingly the same, if not the same already.

I’m already out of my league with trying to understand how much gas that consumes every day. But I’ve not even exited my driveway.

I travel half a mile to the entrance of my housing development where, more often than not, I have to wait for other vehicles coming one way or the other down the road. Living in a rural area, the number of vehicles varies from between none up to perhaps seven. I turn out of my development and by the time I reach the light at the intersection two miles away, I find myself in a line of around ten vehicles.

The road I am turning onto is another story. Some days I am adding myself as one of forty or fifty vehicles, other days one of more than a hundred. I routinely see traffic backed up between this light and the next.

Before I make my turn, I see straight ahead of me the workings of a construction site where they are building a strip mall. In order to do this, they have re-sculpted the landscape using no fewer than a dozen large construction vehicles: massive dump trucks, great big ditch diggers, huge bulldozers, etc. They’re in action when I pass in the morning, and they’re in action when I pass at night.

I make my turn and at the next intersection, a large one, the traffic is backed up in all directions. This is not bad; it usually takes me only a few minutes to navigate through it. In all I may be observing between one and two hundred vehicles here, a number which amazes me because I don’t live in a big city and am arguably still in a rural area.

(This reminds me; I remember once returning from a camping trip to Cape May seeing a traffic jam that stretched from I285 outside New York City all the way to Albany. No lie!)

Heading through this intersection I am on my way toward the major highway: Rt. 90. Every day, the merge lane to Rt.90 is backed up with vehicles. Near as I can tell, it stretches into infinity!

Crossing the Hudson River, almost without fail I see at least one boat, often more (in the summer). Even in the winter the signs are there of the ice-breaker having recently passed through, clearing a channel for the other boats heading to Albany from New York City.

I merge to the next highway and surprise, it’s got lots of cars heading my way. But not as bad as the southbound lane. On more than one occasion I have seen it stalled, choked with vehicles. I take a rather unused exit, one that I had never used before my current job, one that I formerly thought was never used by anyone, and yet: more cars, trucks, motorcycles.

Make a left onto Broadway…more cars. Turn into the parking lot where I work…it’s nearly full with cars, trucks, and motorcycles.

Cars. Cars. Everywhere cars. I can’t go anywhere on any road, almost at any time of night or day, without seeing at least one other vehicle. All burning fossil fuels. I am guesstimating that I, personally, visually observe upwards of 1,000 vehicles before I reach work every day. How much gas is being burned?

Let’s see…

I spend 45 minutes per day, 7 days per week (typical) driving my car. I average ~30 miles per hour (not talking mpg here). I burn about ten gallons of gas per week (maybe a little more). That means I burn approximately 3.5/100ths of a gallon of gas every minute I am in my car driving somewhere. That doesn’t sound too bad, especially considering my vehicle only gets just under twenty miles per gallon.

My six mile, fifteen minute commute to work burns just about half a gallon of gas. One gallon per day commuting. That’s like taking a gallon of milk our of your refrigerator every day to get back and forth to work.

Now let’s assume that I am typical of a per minute burn rate. If I pass 1,000 vehicles all of whom are traveling during the fifteen minutes I am, and all of whom are all burning at the rate I am burning, then we can calculate that in the course of my fifteen minute commute I personally am witnessing the burning of 500 gallons of gasoline.

1,000 gallons of gasoline daily. And that just my commute. Six miles. Fifteen minutes on the road. In a rural to medium-population area.

This is happening all over our country; the same pattern in every town and city everywhere, and at higher levels at that! This is happening in other countries all around the world. It has been going on for sixty years and the experts are saying we’ve got another fifty years left.

Fifty more years of burning at this rate? boiiinnnoing! There goes my mind: boggled.

How long is your commute? How many vehicles do you see? How much burning to you witness every day?