I have been accused, dear friends of leaning to the right. Many of you may find this to be true, and I admit that in matters political, I sometimes do find myself right of center.

You may be surprised, then when I write something specifically advising readers to move to the left.

One of my pet peeves while driving is waiting to turn in the right lane while sitting behind someone is going straight. Not only does this waste my time (and all those waiting behind me), it is an enormous waste of fuel. How enormous? I have often asked myself that question and today I look to answer it. My methodology will be quite notably unscientific, but I'll do my best to answer this question in 15 minutes of time.

Let's start with a few facts:

According to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics, Americans drive about 2.8 trillion miles per year on our roads.

There are roughly 250,000 signalized intersections in the United States.

Again, according to the BaTS, we drive about 1.2 trillion milles on urban roads (excluding urban interstates) each year. This amounts to about 7,000 urban miles for each person, or about 20 urban miles a day.

An average car burns about 0.006 gallons of fuel per minute (that's 1.2 cents at current gas prices) while idling.

And now a few assumptions:

While in urban areas, drivers encounter stop lights at least once a mile, so that's 20 stop lights a day. Let's say that 5 of those times, said driver wants to turn right on a red light and that 1out of those 5 times, on average, he or she is not able to do so because the lane is obstructed. I think these numbers are conservative, because this happens to me more than once a day, and I don't drive that much.

I think it's also safe to assume that we lose about 45 seconds each time we get stuck behind someone who isn't turning.

Here comes the Math:

Conservatively, about 150 million of us encounter this phenomenon every day. At 45 seconds an instance that's an astonishing 1.875 million wasted hours (214 years) of good old American productivity wasted every single day.

Additionally that's 750,000 gallons of gasoline, burnt foolishly every day.

The yearly costs are staggering:

Yearly Time Wasted: 684,375,000 hours
Yearly Fuel Wasted: 273,750,000 gallons

That's a lot of waste, and it's not due to unavoidable things like congestion. It's due entirely to individuals who don't shift to the left lane if they don't need to turn right. Granted, every single instance is not preventable, but imagine how much could be saved if all of us were more considerate of our fellow drivers and shifted to the left each time we encountered an empty right lane at an intersection.

So when you're driving, think left. If you're reading this from most places outside of America, you have resolved many urban congestion issues with roundabouts, and you are much smarter than we are for it.

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