OT: mpg question

Again, if they were serious about this environment bollocks, they'd flatten a fucktonne of roads. The A419 Hot Air Balloon road in Gloucestershire springs to mind.

That's nice dear

Or the M5 J2-J1.

"Tim Streater" snipped-for-privacy@greenbee.net wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@mid.individual.net...

I don't remember seeing any junctions with two exits for the two directions. Maybe I was lucky - this was in rural Massachusetts (towns about 30 miles north of Boston) with one long journey from there to/from Cape Cod. That was when I was visiting my sister and her family who were living near Boston for a few years.

Americans really don't like roundabouts. I only remember one, and that's where the coastal road and the road onto the Cape Code peninsular cross. It was a six-way roundabout (called a "rotary") and I worked out what to expect from the advance sign, so I got into the left lane, went round anti-clockwise (which felt slightly odd) and came off. All a bit of a non-event: what I was very used to, except a perfect mirror-image. When I stopped at a cafe a few miles later, the car behind me also stopped, and the driver actually came over and shook my hand: he'd been behind me and had been impressed with the fact that I seemed so confident. Then he heard my voice and he said "Gee, you're not even American. You're not even used to driving on the right." I though for a moment he was going to bow and kiss my feet ;-)

I only encountered one 4-way-stop junction while I was there, and that was near the airport. Thankfully I was the only car at the junction, so I didn't have to play the "what order did everyone arrive in" game. The 4WS junction is badly flawed for two reasons: it uses time (order of arrival) rather than position (give way to traffic coming from the left - in the US); and it forces all traffic to stop dead, rather than allowing traffic to keep rolling - maybe even at full speed limit - if it can see that there is no traffic coming from the conflicting directions. I prefer the UK arrangement for cross-roads, where one direction is designated the major road with absolute priority over traffic coming at 90 degrees which must give way - nice and simple, and not based on "I was here before you".

One peculiarity that I noticed with US signing (leaving aside distances quoted in absurdly large number of feet, instead of "100 yards" or "2 1/2 miles") was the fact that at a T junction, the direction signs give directions with respect to the way the road was oriented at that point. So you'd be travelling generally northwards, but if the road locally turned east-west, or even back on itself and there was a junction, you were signposted East and West, or even North and South but reversed. Here, the local orientation of the road is immaterial: the road will say "N" or "S" based on whether the destination is north or south of where you are.

I also had to endure the most stupid, idiotic, nonsensical, imbecilic road atlas I've ever seen. Here in the UK, all the pages of a road atlas are to the same scale, in the same cartographic style, and are ordered consecutively west to east for one row, and then west to east for the next maps further north, and so on. If you are going east-west then you only need to turn forwards or backwards by one page. This map book (my sister and her family bought it when they first arrived, and then realised that it was crap) had double-page spreads organised by alphabetically by "town" (effectively the built-up part of the town and the surrounding countryside that came under that town council's jurisdiction), and each map would be at a different scale according to the boundaries of the "town". As you were about to leave one map, you had to turn to a completely different part of the book (not to a consecutive page) and then try to work out where the overlap was when the spacing of roads was different because of the change of scale, and maybe there was even detail on one map that wasn't present on the other. This was in the days before satnavs - late 1990s. And the continuation arrows at the edge of a map said "continued on Ipswich" (so you had turn pages until you found it), and not even "continued on page 17". That map book was an object lesson in how to make a book as un-user-friendly as possible - it probably won first prize in the Bastard Map Book From Hell contest ;-)

Very often, where a minor road joined a major road, there was no give-way/yield/stop line. If the junction is at a right angle, you can infer where you have to stop from the edges of the kerbs (sorry, curbs), but where the junction of your minor road is on a bend of a major road, it's very difficult to judge where the imaginary *curved* line is.

There were some very good things. Drivers were a lot more tolerant of car that took their time in getting away from lights (partly because there is no red+amber phase to give you time to put the car in gear and take the handbrake off), and, both in small towns and in central Boston, they were far more willing to stop to let pedestrians cross, even at places other that designated pedestrian crossings. I once stopped near a shop front (ie not on the kerb) and looked across at the building opposite, before planning to carry on walking along the street. Immediately traffic in both directions stopped, thinking I was about to cross. Their zebra crossings had me baffled for a while: there was a sign "PED XING" which was a random set of letters until it dawned on me "PEDestrian (Cross)-ing".

The main problem on rural roads was if you got behind a school bus: essentially you were stuck behind it for eternity because unless the road was clear you couldn't overtake it while it was moving, and when it stopped it flashed its "DO NOT OVERTAKE" lights, and the driver didn't even wait for a few seconds after the last child had got clear, to allow traffic stuck behind to overtake before he set off again.

The one thing about American cars which was indescribably dangerous was the combined side/indicator and tail/indicator lights, where two front lights were replaced by a steady white light on one side and a flashing one on the other, likewise for steady/flashing red lights at the back. My sister was taking my parents out for a drive and was stopped in the middle of the road, indicating left to turn into a side road. And her car was hit from behind by a driver who didn't see the flashing tail light, and who assumed that because she didn't have her brake lights on (because she was stopped on the handbrake until she could see a gap) she was setting off. At least we have indicators which are a different colour, even if modern car design co-locates those indicators with the bright brake lights or with the headlights. Ever since then, I've got into the habit of flashing my brake lights a couple of times when I'm stopped in the middle of the road if I see a car coming up behind me, or even breaking my unwritten rule of never keeping my brake lights on (to avoid dazzling that car behind) when I'm stopped, in the special case when I'm stopped in the middle of the major road waiting to turn.

The most efficient speed is probably the slowest at which you can drive in top gear. So 40 mph in sixth may be more efficient that 35 mph in fifth. I imagine there are a lot of other factors as well: it may well be that petrol engines and diesel engines behave differently as regards efficiency when it's a toss-up between driving with a slightly higher engine speed but less load on the engine, versus a slightly lower engine speed in the next gear up which makes the engine work harder.

As far as I can tell, my HDi diesel car gives better results with the engine running more slowly and *slightly* labouring in a just-too-high gear, as opposed to with the engine running more freely but more quickly in a just-too-low gear. But I think my previous petrol cars were the other way round. As far as I could tell.

The problem with determining which is better is that the instantaneous fuel consumption figures on a trip computer are often *too* instantaneous so they vary all over the place from second to second, whereas if there was an averaged update every 2-5 seconds, you could compare the two cases (slightly too low a gear versus slightly too high a gear) without lots of random "clutter" in the readings.

I was in California. There are some differences between states.

There are some things that were better regarding roas/traffic. One is the Turn-right-on-red-if-its-safe. The other is the hard rule that if an emergency vehicle is passing, you pull over and stop. We could do woth that here.

But this ignores the ?in gear drag? which means the loss of an amount of kinetic energy. If the drag is costing you more in wasted fuel than an idling engine, you?re better off coasting.

Working out exactly at what speeds and circumstances this applies isn?t straightforward.

Tim

I used 50kWhr this weekend to do 260 miles (130 north, 130 south). Not sure what that is in mpg?

Tim

Gears? An abomination forced upon a motor with terrible power characteristics! ;-)

In reality, I?d bet that doing 40mph in a lower gear would still be more economical than 55 in top just because of wind resistance.

Tim

A litre contains about 10kWh, so that's 5 litres. A gallon is 4.55 litres. So there you are.

I did not realise that. The laws of physics are different in Australia.

In Russia there are people called Tractor & Voucher. In Thailand, Tuktuk is a popularish name. In the Philippines there's Bongbong & Dingdong.

... and here we have Depressed Cupboard Cheesecake!

Last I looked 85% of electricity was generated with fossil fuels, and given generation and the grid transmission efficiency is nominally 30%, you need to multiply that accordingly. I would suggest 16 litres. Or

Mine does that, and when going downhill, will also stop the engine.

How often do new users stumble upon usenet?

Every time you see a new nym, ask youself "Is this Rod?" a couple of sentences is all it takes to decide that it is, in 90% of cases.

Nearer 410 bananas. 1kWh is 860 Calories, a banana is 105 Calories.

Could it not equally be his mate Commander Kinsey / James Wilkinson?

Ah, but what size banana?

At my age, my body averages several WTFs, which is very probably below the 100W you are guessing at.