I head up to Sacramento from Long Beach a couple of times a year for meetings. Recently, I have been driving and spending a day or so in Yosemite or Sequoia. But, with my next meeting in mid-December and as my car isn’t set up for skis, I was all set to fly. But thinking about it, I may just drive:

I can drive in 5 hours and a half hours @ 75 MPH (when I behave myself).

To fly it’s an hour and a half from my front door to take off. Then, it’s another hour and a half to pick up a car and drive into Sacto (thinking that with all the TSA bull I would check luggage). I am going to have to kill a couple of hours after my meeting, coupled with the inconvenience of not being able to leave when I want, so I’ll arbitrarily add another hour and a half to my equation. Therefore: 4.5 hours to fly vs. 5.5 hours to drive, it’s getting pretty close. In fact, here may be an example where TSA has pushed a potential customer out of an airline seat into a car.

The cost of flying vs. driving is kind of a wash (although maybe I should factor in a speeding tix I got a couple of trips ago), particularly since it’s passed thru as a business expense. The meeting is early, and not miss-able, so I’d spend the night before in a hotel either way.

If I could sweeten the deal and get some miles, but American doesn’t fly into SMF (Alaska via PDX or SEA is a little intense/expensive for me), and to get United miles I’d need to add another 45 minutes to SNA or LAX. And, while JetBlue from LGB is as good as it gets to fly without status, their True Blue program is, to me anyway, truly worthless.

So, do people have a formula to decide to drive instead of fly?