How much time does lane-splitting *actually* save? Well, here's how much (for me).
Posted Nov 19, 2014, 7:10 PM UTC
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This is correct. I wonder if I can make google spreadsheets choose better labels.
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That helps
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Worst graphic of all time.
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Yep, and it got to the front page of /motorcycles, fuk me right?
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this graph is really hard to understand
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Edit, for obviousness:
10/31 and 11/13 I am not lane splitting. The other days I am lane splitting.
I live in California. I ride my motorcycle to work most days. Sometimes, if it rains, I'll drive my truck. I set up a system that uses the GPS in my phone to automatically log when I leave my house and when I arrive at work (and vice versa) to a Google spreadsheet. It also logs the weather report each day to see if rain is forecast. Now, just because there's rain in the forecast doesn't mean I won't ride, so some of the days that are marked as "rain" are still days that I rode.
Can you tell which two days in this graph I drove my truck? Moral of the story is, for me, in the SF Bay Area, riding the bike saves tons of time (not to mention fuel).
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Isn't traffic always worse in the rain though? Seems like it'd be a little skewed.
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Rain does not double commute times in general though unless there is an accident.
Lane splitting saves me personally between 10-40mins a day on a 30min commute.
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I'd love to save 40 mins on a 30 min commute....
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Yea well that's why I ride :) Don't want to spend an hour in my car in bumper to bumper traffic when I can just split through the cars :)
The freeway has been closed three times in the last week too, and times have been greater than 1hr for cars as well. The other day due to a truck running over a motorcyclist it was three hours in from the East and from the West it was about 1hr40min for a car. That day it took me 45mins on my bike.
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Would be nice to have more than 2 samples that were affected by weather. It's possible rain caused a minor accident that then slowed all traffic down, and without that accident, not splitting would have taken less time than what's shown in the graph.
We need more data. OP, you have work to do.
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Oh yea not talking about OP, just my own experiences over the last two years. I no longer drive though, but these days they have signs on the freeway with the total travel times given the traffic so I have a good idea anyway these days.
Today took 25mins on the bike, typical car travel time was 48 minutes today with traffic v 31min without traffic, for example.
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so how do we know which dry days you rode to work, or drove to work.. if we assume you rode to work all the dry days then how do you know it was saving you time? typically on a wet day traffic is going to be slower/more congested anyway.
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You can compare wet riding days to dry riding days (granted, there are only 1.5 wet riding days showing on this particular graph) and see that, on a motorcycle at least, wet days are not materially slower than dry days.
You can also compare just wet days. Wet days are clearly faster thus far on the motorcycle.
I would like to come up with a way to automatically detect if I'm riding or driving and have that reflected in the graph, but so far I don't have that data. In this particular graph, there are exactly two driving days and the rest are riding days.
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True that homeslice. I lanesplit here and there even though it's not legal. Just saving time! Time is money! Therefore, saving money!
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Great looking data, good to see some numbers. - thanks for posting :)
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I was hoping for a chart showing your commute times lane splitting vs non lane splitting.
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10/31 and 11/13 I am not lane splitting. The other days I am lane splitting.
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Your dates listed don't include those days. 10/29 has 5 different times.
I think your chart needs some proofreading or reformatting.
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The charts only have one label per week (which is for Wednesday) because that's how Google Spreadsheets draws the labels and doesn't give me an easy way to change it. Sorry if it's not clear. I'm not actually commuting to work five times per day.
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I don't see how you could accurately compare rain days to non-rain days as your 4-wheel control either. Everyone drives slower and stupider in the rain.
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I'd definitely like to see data for no splitting dry days on a bike for comparison. That's the key metric!
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this doesn't even make sense?
There is no control
This is missing a lot of information.
Op needs to combine top and bottom graph with different colors and simply label rain days by sitting rain on the bar.
Then the bottom graph needs to be times to work driving a car.
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It would definitely be useful, but it requires me to sit in traffic when I don't need to, which is quite the willpower test.
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This is your challenge, brave soldier. You have to ask yourself - are the karma points worth it to you?
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What a mind fuck of a graph. You need a comparison for each day of the week.
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Rah Rah fight the power!! I estimate I save about an hour and a half a day on my 46 mile Los Angeles commute, lane splitting/express lane/car pool lane. My coworker has spent more than half a year of the last 5 years of his life driving to and from work. That's depressing.
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Here is a better version of the graph..
Edit: better version. Unfortunately, this one will get buried being added this late.
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As someone who is colour blind, all the colours in this graph make it just as confusing as the original.
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Tell me how to get the paint bucket tool to not be grayed-out and I'll gladly change them.
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Rain slows down the commute on any ride. What if you drive truck on non-rainy day?
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Then I would be driving a pickup truck when I could be riding a motorcycle.
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Touche!
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Please refrain from making graphs anymore lol
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awesome chart. did you use IFTT to automate it by any chance? and more power to ya. I leaned to ride in the Bay Area, but am always nervous to go back and ride because of the high volume of traffic and inattentive drivers.
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did you use IFTT to automate it by any chance?
I did! If people are curious exactly how it works, I can talk about it.
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nice! i had a feeling :P its awesome for automated data collection like that
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Ya, how exactly did you set up your recipes? I just downloaded the app, so I was gonna play around with it.
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The IFTTT portion of this is actually the easy part, the harder part has been getting the spreadsheet/graph to automatically update every time something is added.
Anyway, here's what I've done wit IFTTT.
I have four recipes, but it's basically two copies each of two different recipes. Here's the first on:
IF (trigger):
"You enter or exit an area" (iOS Location trigger)
THEN: (action):
"Add row to spreadsheet" (google drive)
The row that gets added has this format: {{OccurredAt}} ||| {{EnteredOrExited}} ||| home
Then there's another copy of the exact same thing, except the location that's selected is my office instead of my house, and the row that gets added has "work" instead of "home" in the format.
This creates a google spreadsheet that looks like this.
Then my other two recipes are weather based. The trigger is the weather report at 8:00AM and 5:00 PM. They log a row to a different spreadsheet. I use this to determine which days were rainy.
After that, it's a bunch of spreadsheet work, but that's pretty much it for the IFTTT portion.
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I live in Orange County and commute about 40 miles each way to work every day.
When I drove a car it would take, on average, 1 hour and 35 minutes.
On my bike while lane splitting it has never taken me more than an hour. So I'm saving at least an hour per day of drive time.
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Ha, I commute from Mission to Aliso Viejo everyday and still consider it worth it to take the bike instead of my truck. So props to you, for sure, that's one hell of a commute.
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Yeah I'm going from Tustin to El Segundo. Needless to say, my bike has paid for itself.
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You don't happen to work at the Chevron refinery do you? Just a shot in the dark, my friend is an engineer there.
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No, I do not, sorry. My office is pretty close to there though.
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I do Long Beach to Irvine, it takes me about 20 min on the bike regardless of traffic.
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oh so is the graph saying that rain days he took his car?
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Truck vs Bike, big difference I think, perhaps we can compare Car vs Bike.
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If you really think that a car and a pickup truck have significantly different commute times I'd be happy to look at your chart with your data.
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A truck usually means semi trailer but its ok, Americans are really backwards.
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prolly cause we are too busy hauling around awesome to worry about what the fuck its called.
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This is my experience exactly! Almost two hours to go 54 miles in the mornings from Lancaster, CA to North Hills, CA. I got a bike and I am magically there in 58 minutes AND getting 63 miles per gallon. I LOVE IT!
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I save nearly 3 working days of time every month when lane splitting. That's on a 7 miles commute across SF.
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I may just be blind and dumb, but I don't see anything that says "these days I split, these I didn't".
Improved version of graph.
Was it dry or rain on 11/19? :)
That's today. It's only half over.
OP died at work. RIP Op...
enlightening, thanks!!
In his comment at the top he mentions that on days when it rains he drives his truck.
oic