As gas prices continue to hover in the unpopularly high range, an Alexandria, Va.-based group has come out with an estimate of just how much we're spending these days to drive to work.

Results of a study unveiled last week show federal government workers spend $19 million commuting to and from work every business day. The total U.S. white-collar workforce spends more than $355.8 million to commute each day, according to telework advocacy group Telework Exchange.

Those daily commuting costs spiked $5.7 million for federal workers and nearly $106 million for the white-collar workforce between April and September of this year, according to Telework Exchange's study, titled ''Fuel Smart Economy: It's No Gas.'' A key factor in the spike is gas prices: East Coast gas prices jumped from an average of $2.14 per gallon in April to $3.05 per gallon in September. With rising gas prices, total per-day fuel costs have jumped more than 42%, according to Telework Exchange.

In its new study, the Telework Exchange calculates that federal government employees and the white-collar workforce use 31.1 million and 583.3 million gallons of gas, respectively, commuting five days a week. If all these people were to telework two days each week, they could significantly reduce gas consumption - by 12.4 million gallons per week for federal employees and 233.3 million gallons per week for white-collar U.S. workers.

The Telework Exchange was launched by a group of public and private executives in April and is devoted to raising telework awareness and adoption in the federal government. The online community offers information on how federal workers can become telecommuters, as well as calculators that tally the cost of commuting and its environmental impact.

Seeing these hard numbers prompted me to calculate how much I'm saving by working from home fulltime. When I lived in Massachusetts and commuted every workday to Network World's corporate office, I traveled 15 miles each day - a short commute compared to many of my coworkers. My 10-year-old car gets about 21 miles to the gallon in non-highway driving, according to a U.S. Department of Energy site.

With gas at about $3 per gallon, that means I'm now saving almost $11 per week by working from home. In the year since I became a fulltime teleworker, I've probably avoided a few hundred dollars in fuel costs, accounting for fluctuating gas prices. Not bad.