• How to lower operating costs by improving fuel consumption?
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This is a question that most operators will have considered at one time or another. After all there are plenty of fuel saving measures to choose from including top speed limiters, air deflector kits, drive incentive schemes, and now turning left at roundabouts. Yes, that is right (or rather, left) "a left turn at a roundabout could show a saving in fuel," according a recent research report by the Transport and Road Research Laboratory (price 23).
Evidently, the TRRL researchers are not joking. They have gone to a lot of trouble to find a way of working out exactly how much extra fuel is used by a vehicle negotiating a roundabout instead of taking a notional straight line path at "a mean cruise speed."
Lest the readers of the digest underestimate the implications of this study, the researchers point out that, based on their results, simply by reducing the size of 1,000 urban roundabouts around which some 1,000 vehicles are driven daily and "choosing a certain ratio of turning movements", 21 million litres of fuel a year could be saved at a cost of 24.3million.