May Commute Data
I found a fancy-pants TomTom add-on called Tripmaster which is developed by a French enthusiast, along with a couple of other useful add-ons. Tripmaster adds some functionality that probably should have come out of the box, including the ability to track total travel time, moving travel time, overall average speed and moving average speed.
I thought it would be interesting to record my commute times. I would like to make this a regular feature, but it’s a bit of a process to get these charts online - I have to e-mail them from my MDA to a real computer, then I have to tweak the charts, then - since Excel does not seem to have a way to output the charts to jpg - I have to take screen shots of the charts, upload the charts to the Gallery, and then link to them in the post. Yikes.
The charts became pretty unintelligible when i added the date labels, so I just left them out.
Nonetheless, I found some pretty interesting information. These charts actually go from 27 April to 31 May. The time is recorded from the moment I leave my driveway to the moment I pull into a parking space at work. Naturally there is no data for weekends.
Average 43 minutes. Of the 7 above-average trips, 1 was rainy, 1 included a pit stop for gas, and 2 included an attempt to avoid heavy traffic. I forgot or was otherwise unable to collect data on 3 days.
Average 36 Minutes. For whatever reason, the drive home is shorter and also more consistent. It lacks the random unexplainable traffic fluctuations of the commute to work. I don’t have any notes. I forgot or was unable to collect data on 4 days.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
This is pretty interesting data. I have noticed myself that Northbound on the Blue Route is never as bad a South. I think a lot of it has to do with the sun, and the stupid truck hill/Route 1 exit/merge/curve thing.
For the chart portability… You can copy and paste a chart from OpenOffice (Which is Free and multi platform) to your favorite image editing program. You might be able to do the same with M$ products (which cost money, a lot of money). Once you have created the chart, click on it to select it. Then right click and choose copy. Then you can paste it into some program and save it as a jpeg.
You could also use OpenOffice to export the spreadsheet as a pdf.
June 4th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
I guess my HTML was off above (Or Links Aren’t allowed).
OpenOffice - www.openoffice.org
June 4th, 2007 at 3:54 pm
I am really bored today….. Maybe you should try driving to work backwards and see if the commute time evens out. It might even go down to 30 minutes.
June 5th, 2007 at 3:04 pm
I use OpenOffice at home…I’ll have to give it a try from home next time.
Funny thing about the Northbound side is that in the morning it looks REALLY BAD.