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San Jose Mercury News, Calif., L.A. Chung Column

Posted on: Wednesday, 28 September 2005, 18:00 CDT

By L.A. Chung, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

Sep. 28--OLD VALLEY WAYS HANDY IN GAS CRUNCH: OK. Gas prices hurt, but not enough for us to change our habits, eh? We may cut back on some things to afford gas, but we aren't willing to give up a bigger house on the fringe for a shorter commute. We're a little heavy-footed on the gas pedal because we're multi-tasking and trying to make up time on the road.

That's because we're new valley. Not old valley. Maybe it's time for a change of habit.

Because old valley habits can be a good thing. These are people who have always known what mileage they got, how it was different in summer and winter -- and could tweak their usage after figuring out the variables from the data they kept.

Why? Because they're engineers. From a different era.

I grew up with constant record-keeping. "That's 8.9 gallons," Dad would say. By the time I was 9 I'd already have entered the date and service station in the handmade logbook we kept in the glove box. "How much?" I'd ask, ready to fill out the next field.

"$2.05," he'd say. (I meant it when I said old valley.)

Over a week or a month or a year, Dad could tell you what mileage we got. He'd know how much gas we used on vacation, for the whole trip or just a segment in Montana. He'd know if something was out of whack. And make sure to figure it out.

Naturally, I just thought my chemical engineer father was weird. Years later, I found out from old classmates and acquaintances that their dads did the same thing.

"Oh, yes," sighed Nancy Stake, the media relations person for San Jose State University who was trying to direct me to an anthropologist who might decode this behavior. "I grew up here, too."

Dad spent more time giving advice about fuel efficiency than about safety when I was learning to drive. Even when gas was 35 cents a gallon.

Such as, don't "jack-rabbit" from a stoplight, ease forward. Don't rush up to a stoplight -- you're just going to expend energy and gas to stop, anyway. A penny difference in gas can make a difference over the year. So can a few pounds of air pressure.

Logbooks and plotting out graphs were simply a way of life.

"Oh my God, yeah," said Greg Brown, vice president of operations and technology at the Tech Museum of Innovation, and an engineer. He used to head an R&D unit at FMC. He was remembering laboratory notebooks of the '60s and '70s. "When they went home, they wrote everything down in their logbooks." Nothing was too mundane.

Nowadays you can buy a Toyota Prius that gives you instant feedback, Brown noted. The dashboard display "pretty dramatically tells you" when you're using the gas and how much. Engineers can be competitive.

"I know a lot of engineers who try to optimize that," Brown said. "When they go on trips, they try to top their mileage from the time before."

I abandoned the logbook many years ago, when I lived on another coast and my father's car habit influence was far away.

But I realized something recently. The book was our feedback. It kept Dad keenly aware of mileage -- and our habits -- at every fill-up.

The other day, having just paid $2.95 a gallon because I failed to stop at the cheaper station near the office, I found myself easing off the gas pedal on the Central Expressway as I spied a red light way, way up ahead. No sense in wasting gas zooming up to it.

I guess it's time to start that logbook again. Maybe a new valley type with old valley sensibilities has developed a Palm software version.

Besides, those old books are great entertainment. Years from now, I'll ask myself, when was the last time I filled 'er up for a mere $35.40?

-----

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Copyright (c) 2005, San Jose Mercury News, Calif.

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TM, 7203,

Source: San Jose Mercury News

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