Driven to distraction

Damn! I've lost the paperwork. Now I've got to clean up my desk.

Be right back . . .

. . . not finding it . . .

. . . not finding it . . .

. . . found it!

OK. Now. Some numbers:

On May 1, 2008, the mileage on my 2006 Honda Civic Hybrid was 26,778 miles.

On Jan 24, 2009, 268 days later, the mileage was 33,798 miles.

I'm getting the mileage numbers off the service history that's included on the paperwork for my last oil change.

The Honda traveled 7,020 miles over the course of 8 months and 23 days. That's 26.19 miles a day.

The ability to count the number of days, or months and days, or weeks and days (38 and 2) or just weekdays (191) comes courtesy of WolframAlpha.com, that nifty computational knowledge engine.

On Nov. 4, I had the car serviced again. The mileage was 41,375.

In the 9 months and 11 days, the car had traveled 7,577 miles. The average mileage over those 284 days: 26.7 miles.

Fourteen days later, the mileage is 41,646. The 271 miles added to the odometer works out to an average of 19.36 miles a day. If I manage to leave the car in the garage again tomorrow, the average drops to just over 18 miles a day.

Numbers may not lie but I'm trying to figure.

The Wife and I share this car. The Kid has his own. Yes, he does drive the Honda on occasion, but not a statistically significant amount.

Much of the mileage between June of last year and March of this year can be added to the cost of The Wife's cancer treatment. It's 22.6 miles from our home to the UCDMC Cancer Center at 4501 X St. and back again. And if I wasn't driving The Wife to cancer treatment, she was driving to work in Rancho Cordova. That's another 22 miles roundtrip.

While The Wife was undergoing radiation treatment for eight weeks at the beginning of this year, I drove her to the cancer center and then to work and drove home -- 35 miles. I then drove back to pick her up in the evening for a total of something like 57 miles a day.

So I suppose an average of 26 miles a day for every day is "reasonable." But what's the excuse for the 19 miles a day over the past two weeks?

The Wife rides the bus to work now. I work at home. Where's that Honda going?

Yesterday I had a doctor's appointment in midtown. The drive to and back was about 19 miles. That's one day where I drove the average. But the day before and the day after the car sat in the garage.

The Dutch are in the process of eliminating the sales and property taxes on automobiles. Instead of those traditional taxes, the Dutch will start collecting taxes on the number of miles driven with penalties for driving during rush hour.

"Each vehicle will be equipped with a GPS device that tracks how many kilometres are driven and when and where. This data will then be sent to a collection agency that will send out the bill," the transport ministry said in a statement published by AFP.

Under the proposed law, every vehicle type will have a base rate, which depends on its size, weight and carbon dioxide emissions. A standard family car will be charged 7 cents a mile in 2012, increasing to 16 cents a mile in 2018.

Put aside for the moment the "privacy" issue raised by government tracking every place you drive. Being forced to pay attention to where and when you drive or pay the consequences would certainly concentrate the mind.

Dutch proponents of the new distance-traveled tax believe highway congestion will be cut in half and carbon dioxide emissions reduced 10 percent as drivers adjust their driving to reduce the impact of the tax.

If I were paying by the mile today, I would certainly know where I was driving.

Driving 26.7 miles a day works out to more than $56 a month in mileage taxes at the introductory 7 cents per mile tax. At 16 cents a mile, it would cost nearly $130 a month.

Just driving 19 miles a day and paying $40 a month -- growing to $92-- would be enough to discourage my driving.