Study: Federal workers spend $19 million a day driving to work

If federal employees worked away from the office twice a week, 12.4 million gallons of gasoline would be saved each week, according to a new study.

Federal workers are spending $19 million every day commuting to and from their places of work, up from $13.3 million in April, states the study from the Telework Exchange.

Approximately 2.6 million federal employees use about 31.1 million gallons of gas each week, according to the study. Pump prices averaged $3.15 per gallon in the Washington, D.C., area Monday, according to the AAA Mid-Atlantic Daily Fuel Gauge Report, up from $1.94 a year ago.

The Telework Exchange study was based on a survey of 3,500 federal employees who registered on the Telework Exchange Web site.

Users with e-mail addresses ending in ".mil," ".gov," ".edu," or ".us" are able to register for the site and input their commuting habits, such as the type of vehicle they drive and the distance of their commute. Those numbers are then extrapolated to represent the entire federal workforce.

Stephen O'Keeffe is executive director of the for-profit Alexandria, Va.-based organization.

"The federal government must walk the walk as well as talk the talk on telework," O'Keeffe said. "Telework provides America with a green opportunity to reduce gas consumption and a golden opportunity to improve our economy's productivity."

A number of agencies are under budgetary pressure from Congress to increase the availability of teleworking for a variety of reasons, including reducing gridlock and the consumption of gas, bolstering continuity-of-operations strategies and improving employees' quality of life.

Agencies have been lax, according to the Government Accountability Office, in incorporating telework policies into emergency plans, and a private company has developed an advertising campaign in the Washington, D.C., in an effort to build federal workers' interest in working away from the office.