I’ve just had my car converted to using LPG because I want to save time. How does that work? Well, if I use the train to get to work, I can leave home at 5am and get into the office at about 7.15am. Then, coming home, I leave the office at between 3.45 and 3.50pm and I get home around 6.15pm. That’s between four and a half and five hours a day travelling, and as you can imagine, one tires of this pretty quickly. The all time record for the journey to work is around three and half hours.

Why do I do this? Well, that’s the subject for a different article. Suffice to say that I want to cut my travel time to something that I consider reasonable.

So I experimented a bit, and discovered that with traffic the way it is, and parking costs the way they are, driving to the city and parking there just isn’t reasonable. Taking the train all the way takes too long, so there must be a happy medium somewhere in between. I found that driving to Gordon and taking the train from there works out pretty well. I still leave home around 5am (or a bit after) to miss the worst of the traffic, but I get into the office around 6.45am. My leaving time is far more flexible since I no longer need to try and make the right connections—most North Shore trains from Wynyard go through (if not to) Gordon. So all I need to do is make sure I miss the afternoon freeway rush north, and I can get home in just a bit over an hour and a half. That saves me an hour and a half a day.

But at what cost? Taking the train all the way every day costs me about six kilometres of driving between home and the railway station every day and around $60 per week in train fares. Driving to Gordon, it’s a round trip of about 170km per day plus about $30 per week in train fares. Since I only go to the city 4 days a week, the weekly ticket is better for the long trip, where daily tickets turn out cheaper for the short trip. Now to do the run using petrol (which at present is between $1.45 and $1.55 per litre) is horrendously expensive. Somewhere in the vicinity of $100 per week. Add that to the cost of the train fare, and the cost of travel has more than doubled. And hence, I’ve converted my car to using LPG which (today) was selling for $0.64 per litre.

There are two types of LPG conversion that you can have applied to your car. The first costs between $2400 and $3300 depending on where you go. The second costs about $1000 more. The first means that you consume about 30% more fuel (instead of using 10lt/100km of petrol, you will use around 13lt/100km of LPG), the second (gas injection) is a one-for-one conversion. After the conversion, my car seems to have more power, and I wouldn’t be surprised if overall consumption drops—but this remains to be seen.

So here I am, spending an extra $30 per week, but saving something like six hours travel time per week. Of course, there is another trade-off that has nothing to do with time and cost here: when I’m on the train, I invariably have my laptop open, and I’m working. When I’m driving, I can’t do that. Also, driving requires more effort, so although the journey is shorter, it’s more tiring. Again, this is something that remains to be seen.