Road Trip notes

[den]

If you're planning a road trip around the circumference of your country, don't forget to go anti-clockwise in Australia, New Zealand and the UK, and clockwise around the US, Canada and other wrong-side-of-the-road countries.

Why? It's shorter.

Comments

Spot estimation

[baxil.livejournal.com]

Assume the continental United States (since I know its approximate size offhand) is a circle, and has a road around its outer perimeter. Its radius would be about 1,200 miles. A road lane is about ten feet wide, or 1/500 of a mile, so driving on the inside lane instead of the outside lane would be a circle with a radius of 1,199.998 miles.

Circumference is pi * 2r, so c(outer)=2400*pi and c(inner)=2399.996*pi, and their difference is .004*pi miles, about .012 miles. At today's gas prices, in my economy car, this is about one-fifteenth of a cent (or $37.22 Canadian, eh).

HTH!