Gas use project

News

2009-11-10 Updated the submit form to handle multiple cars; adjusted it to look better on Palm Pre; redid login system

2007 The site has been running for a while at http://gasuse.bigasterisk.com/

2005/11/14 - http://darcs.bigasterisk.com/gasuse/csv2rdf is converting the old data to RDF. I looked at http://www.mindswap.org/~mhgrove/convert/ but had a lot of trouble trying to build and run it. And, it's a gui to make some sort of map file that reads CSV rows and outputs triples. I can write a python program instead of a map file-- it'll be about the same length and complexity (when you consider having to read the spec of the convert2rdf map file), although I will do my next round of data cleanup in the same program.

Intro:

I have kept all the receipts for gas for my car since I got the car. For every fillup, I have recorded the car's total miles and the miles since the last fillup (for redundancy). The receipts show the gas station company, location, and price per gallon. Sometimes I take notes about special driving conditions, such as using AC a lot on a road trip.

I should now be able to answer questions such as these:

• How much do I spend on gas?
• Which stations give me the most miles per dollar? Does this answer depend on the derivative of the gas prices, i.e. do different stations' prices rise and fall at different rates such that X is a better station when prices are rising, but Y is better when they're falling?

• Which areas have good gas prices?
• Is my car's efficiency going down over time?
• How often am I in various parts of the Bay Area (as sampled by my station choices)?

• What's my pollution rate? How does it compare to other people's?
• What are the projected dates of my next oil changes and other scheduled maintenances?

• Which of my gas receipt records are probably wrong and should be omitted from the other calculations?

• Do different gas octanes (which I occasionally buy by accident) affect efficiency?

• How much do I expect to spend on gas in the near future?

Results:

Dollars per mile looks like about $0.08 (in 2005), but it can drop to $0.04 when I take a long trip.

When I lost a tire and drove on a spare for most of a week, I drove at 55mph (slow lane, of course). I also used cruise control a lot, which is easy when you're driving 55mph. I got 34mpg on chevron gas over that 9 day period. The next 13 day period, I also drove with chevron gas, but I got 29.5mpg which is around my typical mpg.

Related:

http://www.oaklandgasprices.com/ (and http://www.gasbuddy.com/) tracks prices, hosts boards, and charts average price per region (http://www.oaklandgasprices.com/retail_price_chart.aspx)

References:

http://esw.w3.org/topic/GeoInfo has coverage of semweb geo things

http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/usps "An RDF Schema for United States Postal Addressing Standards", which might help store my sloppy gas station addresses. http://www.w3.org/2000/10/swap/pim/usPlace2LatLong.n3 may be relevant.