Transport Advice

Driving

Share when you can
There are now several local and national schemes to connect people who would like to share lifts. And don’t worry if it doesn’t suit you to do that every day, if everyone shared a lift just one day a week, there would be 10% less traffic on the roads.

Eco-driving
When you have to drive try to share a lift if you can, and use Eco-driving techniques, which can reduce your fuel consumption by 25%. These techniques will improve your safety as well as they include thinking ahead, keeping your tyres inflated and avoiding excessive breaking and acceleration.

Click here for our Eco-driving factsheet.

Calculate your fuel efficiency
Start recording your mileage and the amount fuel you buy, this will enable you to calculate the fuel efficiency of your car. Why not see if you can improve it by using eco-driving techniques. If you are trying to drive less, you can also use this record to try and reduce the number of miles you drive each week or month.

To calculate your fuel consumption, you need to divide the distance driven by the amount of fuel used. So each time you fill up record the number of litres of fuel and the mileage.

For example:

Date	Mileage	Litres	Change in mileage	Miles / litre
01/01/08	89564	46.54
07/01/08	90056	45.36	492	10.9

Subtract the old mileage from the new mileage, i.e. in the case above 90056 – 89564 = 492, record in the change in mileage column, then divide by the number of litres to calculate the miles per litre. If it makes more sense to you, convert the 'Miles/litres' to miles per gallon by multiplying by 4.55 (in the above example 10.9 x 4.55= 49.6 miles per gallon).