A car or bicycle trip log: distance, duration and conditions with the measuring instrument stated

Goal

Keep a per-trip record of distance, duration and conditions for a car or a bicycle in which every distance carries the name of the instrument that produced it, so that trips over months and the same route on different days can be compared without confusing instrument differences with real ones.

Prerequisites

One or more distance instruments: the car's odometer, a bicycle wheel sensor with its circumference setting, or a phone GPS app. A clock. A list of named routes with a fixed start and end point each.

Steps

1. Header: vehicle, each instrument by model, its unit and display resolution, and for a wheel sensor the circumference value entered, since such a sensor derives distance from counted wheel revolutions and that value.
2. Per trip: start and end timestamps with the UTC offset in the RFC 3339 Internet date/time format, route identifier, distance per instrument in its own column, moving time if the app reports it separately, the number of stops, and conditions: daylight or dark, dry or wet surface, wind or weather in a fixed vocabulary, load or passengers, and whether the route was as named or deviated.
3. Never enter a GPS distance into an odometer column or the reverse; if a trip has only one instrument, the other column stays empty.
4. For each named route, compare the distances of repeated trips per instrument and record the spread as a plain range. GPS.gov states that GPS-enabled smartphones are typically accurate to within a 4.9 m radius under open sky and that their accuracy worsens near buildings, bridges and trees; a route through built-up or wooded segments is therefore expected to show more GPS spread than an open one, and the log should mark such segments in the route description.
5. Log instrument events: a tyre change or pressure change for a wheel sensor, an app update or a new phone for GPS, a service that touched the odometer.
6. Monthly: per route and instrument, the number of trips, the distance range, the median door-to-door time and the moving-time range.

Expected result

A trip table in which a longer-than-usual distance can be checked against the instrument, the deviation flag and the conditions, and in which the same route's distance spread is known per instrument before any trip is called unusual.

Limits and test basis

Proposed protocol; odometer and wheel-sensor calibration are unknown to the household, and the GPS accuracy figure is the cited page's typical value under open sky, not a property of any particular phone or route. Fuel or energy use, cost and driving or riding practice are outside the log.