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Promoting Telecommuting During the Gas Dearth?
Oren F. asks: "The President of AeroAstro, Inc., a small aerospace company, has begun promoting his employees to conserve gasoline during these times of high prices by telecommuting to work each day from their homes at least once a week. How is your company responding to the current situation?"
..this neat conversion company!
Let's hope there will be more of them soon..
"Forget it"
-- Is "Sig" copyrighted by www.sig.com?
I've been cycling to work for the last three months and it has been great. Some days I have to use public transport if the weather is really nasty but I am averaging about 80% of my travel by bicycle. Lots of health benefits, zero emissions, very cheap to run. I cover 12 miles per day, some hills but I hardly notice them any more and it only takes me 35 mins each way.
A quick calculation to show the current price of UK fuel compared with the US:
$3.00 per US gallon (seems about average)
£0.92 per UK litre (at my local Asda)
1 US gallon = 3.79 litres (1 Imperial gallon is 4.54 litres)
£1 = $1.82
therefore, UK price is currently $6.35 per US gallon.
The other day it cost me £5 more to fill my car than it had done three weeks previously when I last filled it prior to a trip to York. I dread to think what people driving big 4x4s are paying when my little 1.6 Alfa Romeo costs £42 to fill.
"I have the attention span of a strobe lit goldfish, please get to the point quickly!"
Prices in the UK aren't high because of economics. They're high because an unreasonably high percentage (up to 75%) of the total price comes from taxes.
A prius does not cost $50,000. My mom bought one a few years ago and it was just a tad over $20,000.
At the time though, I thought it was a silly purchase from an economical perspective as she only drives 7,000 miles a year. Even now, with the gas prices going up, it's questionable whether the cost differential between that and a nice corolla and the increased risk of abnormal maintenance needs is worth the gas savings. 7000Mi/y / 30 MPG = 233 G. The Prius @45MPG could cover the same distance in 156 G... so you only save 77 G. $144 ($2/G) then, $231 ($3/G) now per year. If you keep the car for 8 years and gas prices remain constant, your only looking at around $1000-2000 in gas savings over the life of the car with low mileage driving patterns.
That said, many people drive 20,000 miles per year, and for them, the 3x ($3000-6000) savings may be worth it or at least around the break even point.
I think my mom bought the car for its environmental friendliness and its coolness factor rather than any perceived economical savings. There are probably other much cheaper more effective ways to help out the environment, but one can hardly argue with the coolness factor.
If you are thinking about doing an engine mod to save money, you should run the numbers before investing $10,000 into your car. In particular, look at the expected lifetime of the car and your cost savings per year. Also, it might not be a bad idea to take into account the interest you could earn on that $10,000 over the lifetime of the car. Eg, if the life of the car is 8 years, and you invest 10K at the beginning, well, that 10K earning 10% interest could pay for $1,000 worth of gass per year ($1,000/yr / $3/G * 30Mi/G = 10,000 Mi/yr... and you get to keep the $10,000.
Some of the European posters have commented about options such as walking, bicycle, or public transportation. If you live in a metropolis here in USA, then those are viable options.
I live in one suburb of a small city and work in a different suburb of the small city. My commute is about 25 miles one way, 95% highway, which burns about 1 gallon of fuel.
Walking or cycling are not options, neither is public transportation (doesn't go where I go).
The only other option is car pooling, which is nearly impossible with a variable schedule including meetings at other locations that require a drive, picking up kids at day care, etc.
There's also a growing trend here in the states of people moving further away from cities into rural farming areas.
So keep in mind that some Americans have vastly different circumstances. That isn't an excuse to drive some monstrosity that gets 10 MPG though.
Because of complaints about the high cost of gas, the CEO asked my manager to draft a work-from-home policy. He's a butt-in-seat manager that doesn't trust anyone. His new policy? You can work from home for a maximum of half of the day.
I work at a university which is pretty liberal about this sort of thing, but I can make a recommendation to any private companies that want to encourage it.
Assign a work-at-home day. If everyone picks their own day then you'll never have a day where everyone is at work.
Make the work-at-home day Thursday. My experience suggests this is the day that you'll get the most productivity at home. Definitely don't do it on Monday or Friday or work-at-home day will just be a 3-day weekend! (what do you think this is, France?)
Have an online meeting at about 10:30. Set everyone up with cheap web cams and just spend 30 minutes to an hour on an informal, "here's what we did this week" meeting. Those kinds of informal meetings are good for small groups anyway.
Use an IM client. It's much better than email or phone calls for quickie questions: "hey bob, tell me again what the param list is."
Require a followup email at 5:00. Even if it's just to say, "I've been working on this all day but I'm not done yet."
On the technical side, obviously you're going to need to let employees set up a secure tunnel into a VPN - not the main company network. They need to be able to get to shares on file servers for example, and to hit their machines via remote desktop, but they shouldn't be able to hit shares on their local machines.
All of that said, I really prefer to be at work. My chair and desk here are more comfortable. I'm also one of the lucky ones who lives close to work and I try to ride my bike at least once a week.
I work for a big telecom that encourages customers to get DSL service so they can telecommute.
Our own telecommute policy? We're not allowed to telecommute. Yeah, we suck that way.
The taxation rate in the UK is indeed high, but I am amused at the implication in your post that taxes have nothing to do with economics.