I’m sitting in my car, waiting to pick up my son from school. It’s too cold to wait outside this time of year so I keep the heat on, the engine running, and continue listening to the Dunc’d On Basketball Podcast, the nerdiest podcast about basketball out there. I’m also quite anti-social, so I prefer to sit in the car, rather than, like, talk to people.
The driver of the car in front of me is doing the same (presumably, minus the podcast listening), ditto for the car behind of me. Maybe they’re reading “The Pickup Line,” an e-mag specifically for parents who sit in the car, waiting to pick up their kid from school. It occurs to me: boy there are a lot of cars idling in front of the school right now. I’d guess about 40. But y’know, someone should really count these up.
I get typically get to the school about 10 minutes before the release bell rings and I’m sort of in the middle of the pack of idling cars. I’d guess it’s about the average of when most cars arrive, again, most of which are idling. While I don’t conduct this environment-destroying practice all year long – when the weather is nice I’ll get out and check my phone, rather than talk to other parents – I practice it for maybe half the school year. That’s about 80 days or so.
80 days x 10 minutes of idling per day. Boy, 800 minutes of idling seems like a lot doesn’t it? And if there are indeed 40 cars at my son’s school, averaging a similar amount of idling time, we’re looking at 32,000 minutes of car idling. That’s over eight days of just idling.
We have a train that goes through town and we have signs encouraging us to turn off our car, rather than sit there idling, while we wait for the train to pass through. And I sometimes follow that instruction! I should probably follow it more often and more aggressively. But what about idling in the school pickup line? Or along the side of the school for us anti-socialites?
- How much gas are we wasting?
- How much Carbon Monoxide are we putting in the air?
- How much gas waste / CO is the entire town/state/country contributing?
- Would it be better to just switch off the car and start it later?
Boy, oh boy, someone oughta do the research on this…
What about at your school? How much gas is wasted in a day, week, or school year? Could students do the research? Could they create an awareness campaign for reducing gas waste (and presumably promoting cleaner air at their school)? Seems like something a bunch of go-getter students could handle.
If this scenario interests you and these questions intrigue you, consider adapting it to fir your school.
Update 8/25/2019: Stay tuned on this post or subscribe to follow ups. I like this project idea so much I’m going to be developing it and adding resources and sample project calendars.
emergent math 