Gas Saving Web Applications

I hate idling on the highway. There are few things I hate more and a ton of things I hate less. Not only is it an absolute time-suck to be sitting in my car going 2 miles per hour, taking what should have been a 20 minute ride from work to home and stretching it out to almost three times that amount, but it wastes a ton of gas—and fast.

Neither of those two observations is satisfactory. That’s why I’ve committed this article to helping you empower yourself with some online applications that will give you and your gas tank, some much deserved relief.

Traffic Monitors

Traffic monitoring services have recently been adopted by Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft in their continued efforts to attract a wider audience. These traffic reports are being piped to and delivered through their respective free, online mapping utilities. I’ll save the in-depth comparison of the three services for a later post, but for now, suffice it to say that Microsoft Live Search Maps is the most up-to-date and accurate free traffic reporting tool out there. For a sample of evidence, here’s a series of images taken of the highway I frequent to and from work every day. The images were taken within a five minute period of each other.

While online traffic reporting is generally still limited to covering freeways and highways, if your commute to work passes through one of these areas it can seriously cut down on your travel time.


BeatTheTraffic.com

Another useful tool comes from BeatTheTraffic.com. While the site works to promote the subscription version of its services, the free tools and information it provides may be sufficient to give you the insight you need to plan the best route.

One feature I like is the travel time chart.

One of the most interesting features of this chart is the 3 to 4 pm interval where traffic congestion almost reaches the highest rate of acceleration of the day. This tells me that if I can hit the highway as close to 3 as possible, I’ll minimize my traffic time.

Another interesting, though arguably useless feature, is the ability to see updated photos of traffic along a highway.

I say useless since its fairly difficult to judge from a photo how fast traffic is moving. For me, this tool is nothing more than a novelty.

Gas Price Index

Interested in finding the lowest gas prices in your area? Try PortlandGasPrices.com. Powered by GasBuddy.com, PortlandGasPrices.com is a powerhouse of information. It will display a multitude of gas prices in your area from all types and sizes of gas stations. One useful feature is the ability to search by gas category (regular, midgrade etc.). Not everyone uses regular, and for those people, PortlandGasPrices.com is an especially excellent resource.

If PortlandGasPrices.com happens to overwhelm you, trot on over to MapQuest for another great resource. Click on the Gas Prices button near the top left and enter in your location. MapQuest will then spit out the lowest gas prices in your area along with their destinations. MapQuest will also sort by gas category.

So that was a primer on how you can tap into some great online resources to help you save on gas and time in your weekly routine. After using these services and fine tuning them to my own schedule and route, I was able to cut my average commute time down from 45 minutes to 23!