On the Economics of Cycling
I was speaking to my sister-in-law today and she raised the subject of how cheap it is to cycle. This is something I’ve wanted to blog on for the last week or two, and now I’ve an excuse. So here goes!
My bike has 769 miles on it right now, after over year’s commuting to work (and using it for miscellaneous errands). I’ll be generous and assume that every one of those miles was one that I’d have driven (this is not actually the case, for today and last Saturday I rode for the sake of riding, and last year I spent a fair amount of time in Boulder riding after work). My car gets about 35 miles a gallon, so that works out to almost 22 gallons of gas unused; at today’s gas prices that’s as near $50 as makes no difference.
Pretty good, right? Not really. That bike cost in the vicinity of ten times that, and what with inner tubes, a new tyre, cycling shorts and jerseys, an air pump and so forth much, much more.
My car, OTOH, cost me about $4,800 almost six years ago, and I've put over 60,000 miles on it and spent about $4,000 on it. So that’s $8,800 for the car. Annual insurance is about $500, so let’s say $3,000 in insurance. In my car 60,000 miles would take about 3,850 gallons; at today’s prices that would be $8,675 (although it was much cheaper six years ago—less than half the price, but let’s try to make driving look as expensive as possible). So all told that’s $20,475 to travel 60,000 miles, or about 34¼¢ per mile (a bit less than the IRS-approved 36½¢ per mile).
I’ve spent around $750 on my bike and accessories: let’s just say that it costs $1/mile to ride my bike, much more than than 34¼¢ per mile. Those 769 miles would have cost $265 to drive, much less than I’ve spent on cycling: about a third, in fact. Granted the cost of riding a mile right now is essentially nil, cycling—at least for me—doesn’t seem to be economical. But it has gotten me healthier, and that’s worth something. If I were the sort of person to get a gym membership, then I could count that savings, but I’m not and so I can’t.
Now, if I keep this up for another three years then maybe cycling will break even or start to show a profit.
