Cisco man's 7-hour commute is killing Yosemite | The Register

Extreme Commuting: Take II
A rebuttal

This comment was posted at theregister.com concerning Dave Givens 6+ hour daily commute. The author put into numbers what was going through my head when I read about it.

Let's do a little math here. If this gentleman takes, say, 3 hours to get to work and 3 hours to get home on a typical day. That means he is spending 6 hours of every day on the road. Assuming, generously, that he takes 30 days off per year what with vacations, holidays and all that, at 6 hrs x 230 days, that's 1,380 hours per year that he wastes in the car rotting his intestines out with coffee and brainwashing himself with Tony Robbins tapes. 1,380 hours is 57 and a half days, so he is effectively tossing away two months of his life every year just so he can claim he works at Cisco. Now since he has done this for 17 years, that's 17 x 2 months, or 34 months, so in effect, he has wasted almost three years of his life hauling his own ass around, traffic jams, sucking road smog, and adding to global warming.
Let's say that the average car is driven 20k miles per year. The average car produces 77.1 pounds of hydrocarbons per year, 575 pounds of carbon monoxide, 38.2 pounds of nitrogen oxides, and 11,450 pounds of carbon dioxide....and uses 585 gallons of gas. Mr Givens, with his earth-hostile attitude, driving 372 miles per day, for the conservatively assumed 230 days per year, drives 85,560 miles per year, or 4.278 times the average. Therefore in 17 years, Mr Givens, while Awakening the Giant Within, has belched out 5,607 pounds of hydrocarbons. He has spewed 41,817 pounds of carbon monoxide, and 832,712 pounds of carbon dioxide into our planet's atmosphere, more than one pound for every acre of Yosemite. Now according to our buddies at the Wikipedia, CO2 has a density of 1.98 kg/m3. Converting to SAE, over 17 years, Givens has gifted us with 6,736,750 cubic feet of carbon dioxide. Stacked on top of each other, these cubic feet would be as high as 513 Mount Lyells, the highest peak in Yosemite.

John Muir, who founded Yosemite National Park, would roll over in his grave. It's nice to know that Givens, who loves his "scenic" back yard, is doing his part to conserve it.

Dave

IMHO any employer who has an employee who commutes 6 hours each way is paying for 8 hours work what would be the market rate for 14 hours. When an employer has exteme commuting employees, that's a sure sign that the employees are overpaid.



Cisco man's 7-hour commute is killing Yosemite | The Register