Thursday, September 5, 2013

Fuel usage down

I received this email Tuesday morning from the police garage manager, Pat Wenzl, with a spreadsheet attached.
"We ended the fiscal year using 13,440 fewer gallons of fuel and driving 169,417 fewer miles.  We were 6.8% under projection in our mileage budget which is about $194,000.  Let's hope the trend continues into 13/14."
Using the data from Pat's spreadsheet, I updated this graph, which shows the longer term trend beginning in the last quarter of 2004.


That's a pretty dramatic drop in fuel usage, in a City that has grown quite a bit geographically in the past decade. I've blogged on this topic previously, but to recap, the cause of the drop is a more fuel-efficient fleet, and less idling of vehicles. Gas is huge expense when you drive 2.3 million miles a year, and a 20% decrease in the average monthly fuel use over the past ten years represents a huge amount of taxpayers' dollars.

12 comments:

Herb said...

In addition to more fuel efficient vehicles, better staffing, and the instigation of policy and mindset that has taken place over ten years, I think recognition should be given to Pat, Beth, Tim and other other staff at the Garage. Lincoln has one of the most cost efficient and well run fleet systems in the country. In addition to increasing their capability to work on more complex vehicles, they have taken on more than just the Police fleet and provide service to a multitude of agencies. If we could get the rest of the city's governmental agencies to operate at the level of the Police Garage, we could truly be the community that some folks try to tell us we are.

Tom Casady said...

Herb,

Amen!

Anonymous said...

Can you elaborate on how the dept. achieved this?

Tom Casady said...

4:13,

In 2005, responding to rising fuel prices, we developed and implemented a fuel reduction plan. Highlights included training for officers on techniques for improving mileage, a supervisory focus on unnecessary idling, and a general cultural shift in which everyone would recognize that such things as running your engine to defrost your windshield rather than getting out the ice scraper was simply not something we do any more. We put a lot of effort into getting vehicles out of the traffic lane and engines off more frequently.

More importantly, we started a process of altering the nature of the fleet, mixing in hybrids and 4 cylinders for unmarked vehicles, a few hybrid SUVs (Ford Escapes) for marked vehicles, and six-cylinder Chargers, Impalas, Explorers and Tauruses (Tauri?), rather than 8 cylinder Crown Vics and full sized SUVs.

Anonymous said...

And with cng at half the price of gasoline why are we not moving anything in that direction? The higher cost of the vehicle will be offset by the lower cost of fuel in a year not to mention that all the money spent will stay in the states and not be shipped to the middle east!

Anonymous said...

Wouldn't it be nice if we could be rewarded for saving that money by using that money (that was already in the budget) to hire almost three additional officers (at $88K per) that people are debating the need for?

Tom Casady said...

6:25,

Let's not exaggerate. At 20K miles per year, the payback on an $8K conversion is over three years. Have you ever seen the trunk of a police patrol car?

10:35,

That would certainly be splendid.

Anonymous said...

Would love to see more police motorcycles out on the street to help with fuel efficiency.....

Tom Casady said...

8:48,

I was a motor officer (as was Chief Peschong), so the urge is there, but the reality is that a motorcycle is about a 9 month proposition in Lincoln. You can't operate in all weather, transport a prisoner, get a stranded motorist out of the sleet, or carry the same quantity of gear. Have you seen the trunk of a police car lately? Thus I think motors will continue to be special purpose vehicles in relatively small numbers, representing around 5% of the rolling stock.

Anonymous said...

There are a lot of ill-considered pipe dreams out there, and you've shot a couple of them full of holes quite nicely.

Mark in AZ said...

Can you overlay the MPG for that time frame? It's hard to determine how much savings is from fleet efficiency and how much is from less miles being driven. Do you estimate how many hours are driven vs idling in your fleet?

Tom Casady said...

Mark,

Here's the MPG chart.

From the last quarter of 2004, to calendar year 2013:

Monthly miles driven went from 19,043 to 15,010. Fleet average MPG went from 11.0 to 13.5.

I do not have a good estimate of idling vs. moving time. It would just be a wild guess.