UPS Delivery Trucks Save 10 Million Gallons of Gas Every Year by Not Making Left Turns

(Photo: zyphbear)

Making a left turn on a 2-way street in the United States can take a while. Those few extra seconds add up for a company like UPS, which operates 96,000 trucks. Since 2001, the company has closely examined how it can become more efficient. It found that left turns waste a lot of time sitting at stop lights. It would save gas to just make right turns.

So, in 2004, the company created a navigational program that would map driving routes with just right turns. It’s not only thrifty, but environmentally fiendly. Alex Mayyasi writes for Priceconomics:

As of 2012, the right turn rule combined with other improvements -- for the wow factor, UPS doesn't separate them out -- saved around 10 million gallons of gas and reduced emissions by the equivalent of taking 5,300 cars of the road for a year.


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Mythbusters agrees. The television program tested UPS’s method and found that it worked.

-via VA Viper


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I suspect that their miles-per-gallon is higher, because rather than sitting there idling while they wait to turn left (0 MPG), the trucks are moving. Sure, it doesn't really save fuel, but on some corporate report, somebody can prove that their fleet's fuel efficiency really has improved, and then somebody got a raise for introducing such a money-saving policy.
The data don't lie!
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So much wrong with the experiment, a sample of one being the first. And you're telling me you can drive further, take more time, and use 2/3 the amount of fuel? (1:52, and 3% is wrong) People confuse Mythbusters with science.
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