Improving odometer granularity

I used to have a very short commute by car but never gave it that much thought. However when my insurance asked me to estimate by yearly commute I was backed in a corner. It was only a few miles, but was it 2, 3 miles? Both numbers are small, but relative to each other that's a 50% difference!

And when multiplying by two trips each day and about 250 commuting days, that's quite a difference in total miles. I doubt that I would have benefited from a much larger rebate travelling 1000 or 1500 miles per year for commuting purposes, but it was too late, I needed to know.

The problem was not as simple as checking the odometer at the beginning and end of trip end of story. The issue was the odometer's granularity which only showed miles. Looking at the odometer more carefully over a few days showed that some days the odometer digit wheel would turn twice, sometimes three times. So what was my commute?

Intuitively it seemed like if I kept track of how many times the mile wheel turned each time and then averaged that out I could get an estimate with as much precision as I wanted. But was this intuition correct?

Well, let's say my odometer is at O + x miles, where O is the truncated mileage, and x is the fraction of mile started (x in [0, 1[). Looking at my odometer I only see O, but after (1-x) miles I will see O+1.
Let us also say that my commute is C + y where C is the truncated mileage and y the extra fraction mileage (y in [0, 1[).

So I originally see O miles on my odometer, and after my commute I will be at O + x + C + y miles, and the odometer will show:

• O + C          if (x + y) < 1
• O + C + 1    if (x + y) >= 1

We can assume x to be a random uniform variable on [0, 1[. y however is fixed and part of the commute.

So my odometer will indicate a commute of C + 1when x >= 1 - y, and C otherwise.

Therefore, by averaging my estimated daily commutes I will get an expected value of:

(1 - y) * (C + 1) + y * C = C + y which is the true value I wanted to get to.

So averaging the bi-modal values of C and C + 1 will provide me an unbiased estimate of my true daily commute.

Of course I could also have gone back and forth an entire weekend dividing total trip commute by number of back-and-forths...

But it's not like I have time to lose ;-)