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By Trevor Reichman
On Wa$ted, the Zellers were loaned a hybrid vehicle during their challenge period, drastically reducing their gasoline consumption for the month.
But you don't have to wait for a hybrid, or even a plug-in-hybrid to start getting over 100 miles per gallon.
You can achieve that noble goal right now by taking the city bus.
The math works like this:
- While a full size city bus only gets 3.5 miles per gallon , it can seat over 40 people comfortably and can carry over 60 passengers when counting standing room.
- If there was only one passenger, a bus ride would be even less efficient than driving a hummer. But adding one passenger doubles the efficiency of the trip and so on and so on.
- To find the miles per gallon per person on a full size city bus, you can multiply 3.5 by the number of passengers.
As I was riding the #82 bus in Houston today, I counted 39 passengers. This amount stayed fairly constant as we were chauffeured down Westheimer blvd, a major eight-lane artery across Houston, which oddly enough used to be called "Farm to Market Road".
For this particular journey, each passenger was getting 136.5 miles per gallon. It is as if each person on the bus was driving a futuristic plug in hybrid, not yet available to the public. To put that another way, it is as if each passenger on this bus is getting more than double the gasoline efficiency when compared to driving solo in any of the most efficient vehicles currently available to the public today.
BTW, most of this article was conceived and written on Bus #82. You can’t do that in a Prius!
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