UPS Saved Millions of Gallons of Gas by Not Turning Left!

Here’s a smart idea: last year UPS shaved 28.5 million miles off its delivery routes and saved about 3 million gallon of gas partly by … not turning left!

It seems that sitting in the left lane, engine idling, waiting for oncoming traffic to clear so you can make a left-hand turn, is minutely wasteful — of time and peace of mind, for sure, but also of gas and therefore money. Not a ton of gas and money if we’re talking about just you and your Windstar, say, but immensely wasteful if we’re talking about more than 95,000 big square brown trucks delivering packages every day. And this realization — that when you operate a gigantic fleet of vehicles, tiny improvements in the efficiency of each one will translate to huge savings overall — is what led U.P.S. to limit further the number of left-hand turns its drivers make.

A short, delightful article by Joel Lovell at the NY Times: Link (Illustration by Tamara Shopsin)