Let's assume that we are driving back home with friends from winter vacation in the mountains.
- The distance to our home city is 850 km
- We are driving with an average speed 110 km/h
- We will make three short 15 minute breaks and 1-hour long dinner break, what gives:
Total time of breaks = 3*15 min + 1h = 1h 45min
- We will start the trip on the 21 February 2018 at 10:00 am
Now, the most interesting question - when will we be at home?
Let's calculate the total drive time:
Total drive time = (distance/average drive speed) + total breaks time = 9h 28min
Arrival time: 21 February 2018 at 07:28 pm
Now, we want to know, how much this journey will cost us? With our drive time calculator, the answer to this question is very simple!
- Let's assume that our SUV car takes 9.5 liters of fuel per 100 km
- The gasoline price is €1.22 per liter
- We are traveling as a group of 4 friends -> Number of passengers = 4
Asnwer to the question is below:
Total drive cost = (distance/100)*car fuel consumption*fuel price = €98.52
Drive cost per person = total drive cost/number of passengers = €24.63
Super! Now, we know all we need - the exact travel time to home with an estimated time of arrival and how much each passenger needs to pay for that journey. Let's start the engine! 🙂
We have also a great tool called traffic density calculator that helps you analyze the traffic on any road.
Check out the gas calculator too, if you need to estimate only just cost of fuel for a drive.
Driving time between two cities
Travelmath helps you find the driving time based on actual directions for your road trip. You can find out how long it will take to drive between any two cities, airports, states, countries, or zip codes. This can also help you plan the best route to travel to your destination. Compare the results with the flight time calculator to see how much longer it might take to drive the distance instead of flying. You can also print out pages with a travel map.
You may want to search for the driving distance instead. Or if you're thinking about flying, make sure you compare flight times between airports. For a long road trip, check the cost calculator to see if it's within your budget.
Why do journeys home seem shorter?
At the University of Texas, I have two offices: one in my department and one that I use in my role as the director of the masters program in the Human Dimensions of Organizations. As a result, I often have to walk from one side of campus to the other for meetings. It is important to do a good job of estimating the amount of time it will take to walk from one place to the other to ensure that I am not late for an appointment, but also that I do not waste time sitting around waiting for a meeting to start.
The walk is familiar enough now, that I know how long it takes, but when it first started, I had to guess. What factors affect these guesses about how long it takes to go from one location to another?
An interesting paper by Priya Raghubir, Vicki Morwitz, and Amitav Chakravarti in the April, 2011 issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology looked at how familiarity with the destination affects your judgments of how long a trip will take.
They started by asking whether people thought it would take longer to go from their home to a location than to go from that location to their home. They asked students in a classroom either to estimate how long it would take to walk from their home to a classroom or from that classroom back home. The estimates were about 4 minutes longer to go from home to the classroom than to go home from the classroom.
Why would judgments about home be shorter?
The authors reason that people consider their home to be a bigger location than the destination. That is, you are familiar with your home and surrounding area, and so when going from home to another place, it will take you longer to feel like you have really left your home area. Similarly, when you are going from somewhere else to home, you will feel like you are almost there earlier in the trip.
To test this possibility, they performed another study in which people made judgments about a journey between two cities that were several hours' drive away. One city was their home city. The participants were given elaborate driving directions like those you would get from Mapquest or Google Maps. Of interest, people had to judge when they felt that the journey was under way and when they thought the journey was halfway complete.
When people were thinking about driving from their home city to another location, they felt like they had to drive further before the journey was really under way or when they were halfway there than when they were driving from another city to their home. That is, the familiarity of the locations near home made it feel like the early stages of the journey were long.
This work suggests one reason why you often feel like the travel required to go somewhere on a vacation seems to take much longer than the travel required to get back home.
This phenomenon may also affect your beliefs about the amount of time that it will take to get a project done. If you are doing a project where the first steps are familiar, you may choose to start early, because you know how much work is required to get started. If you are doing a project where the ending parts of the project are familiar, though, you may feel confident starting later, because the project will feel like it is nearly completed faster.
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