Work Mileage
I don't love driving, but I seem to do a lot of it. Most of my driving recently has been for work, but I recently left that job. The amount of driving wasn't the only concern, but it was certainly on my mind. Today I found my mileage log and decided to look back at the last three years of driving.
Driving trends
At my old job I drove a lot - I was consistently between 1,000 and 2,000 miles per month, with one bad month over 2,500 miles.
It turns out that most of my driving was actually just commuting. My commute to the office, which was tracked as part of my truck mileage, was about 40 miles round trip.
This histogram shows it even better:
- The first big spike shows the days that I didn't drive at all - weekends, holidays, working from home, etc.
- The second big spike shows days I just commuted to the office and back.
- Everything after that is when I would do site visits, drop off parts, etc.
Below I've filtered out anything under 50 miles to show the times I was actually driving somewhere beyond the office:
Over 200 days I drove for 1-4 hours, and 27 times I drove over 4 hours in a day. My only saving grace was Friends at the Table, a podcast that I binged every time I was on the road. Without them my sanity would be even further gone.
The natural rhythm of that job came from predominantly working in schools - most of the driving would be over spring or summer breaks while students were on vacation. You can see a natural bump around July here, but there are high outliers in every month. Personally I dreaded driving through snowy northern Indiana every winter for project development.
Comparison to personal driving
I don't keep records as cleanly for my personal car, but here's a decent comparison between them:
And for fun, a yearly plot:
In total, over three years I drove
I'm very happy that my new job is fully remote.