Company leaders figured out that sitting in traffic, waiting to make a left, burns way too much fuel. So they zapped as many left turns as they could from 100,000 truck routes a day.
That is right, UPS doesn't make left turns on routes unless absolutely unavoidable.
According to the company, this simple technique saves an eye-popping amount of gasoline. "In the last year alone," a UPS release stated, "this system has shaved nearly 30 million miles off UPS's delivery routes, saved 3 million gallons of gas, and reduced emissions by 32,000 metric tons of CO2 - the equivalent of removing 5,300 passenger cars off the road for an entire year."(emphasis mine)
Holy Crap Batman, 3 million gallons of gas!
Don't let the greenies find this out, otherwise we will never be making a left hand turn again.
I have hear this before. Think about how many stops a UPS truck makes every day. 100? 150? How long would you have to wait to make a left hand turn? 10 Seconds? 30 seconds? 2 minutes? Depends on traffic, but could be a prolonged period of time.
Actually, I try to apply this policy in my own driving when planning the day. Partly to save fuel, and partly to save time.
This is also why UPS shuts down their trucks when they arrive at a delivery stop. If you ever watch a UPS driver roll up, they have barely stopped the truck and the key is off. No matter what time of year. Not an efficient use of fuel to sit and idle. And they have figured out that it uses less fuel to restart their truck than it burns idling for the 1-2 minutes while the driver is out of the truck.
And I will guarantee you, UPS did not put the time into figuring this out to be environmentally friendly. It is all about the bottom line.
Posted by: Petey at April 21, 2008 09:45 AMI've heard this before about left turns. In fact that was given today on the radio as a good way to save fuel is to plan your trips so that you make less left turns than you need to.
Posted by: Contagion at April 24, 2008 12:20 PM