corrado33

25-30 to drive in the winter (including warming up car, scraping car, etc.)
15 to ride

SO uh.. 0.6 ratio

noglider 

You must be a skilled winter cyclist. Where are you? May I invite you to put your location in your profile? It's fun and profitable.

Steely Dan

i live roughly 5 miles from work. my route takes me through dense, urban, congested, trafficy surface streets on chicago's far north side and south evanston. times are roundtrip.

car: ~45 minutes @ rush hours

bike: ~50 minutes

train: ~60-90 minutes (i have a 10 minute walk to/from the station, and an annoying line transfer that's a total crap-shoot on the timing, hence the big range)



my driving vs. biking quotient is 1.111, so i need to have a pretty compelling reason not to simply just ride my bike to work.

InTheRain

34 minutes RT in the car
46 minutes RT on the e-bike

TCQ = 1.35

When commuting on carbon fiber road bike, RT = 55 minutes

TCQ = 1.62

IrishBrewer

I don't just look at it as biking vs driving but as a time savings for getting in my workouts. So, all of the time I would have been driving is time saved because I'm getting a health benefit by riding instead. Then, all the savings related to not putting miles on the car is just a bonus.

icyj

Around 3 here. My commute is ~17 miles, mostly rural with posted speed limits of 55-65mph ending in town with posted speed limit of 30mph (minimal traffic). I can generally keep an 18-20mph avg speed on bike. Would be impossible to reach 1 here unless I can find a semi taking my exact route and catch its draft

wunderkind

Door to Door

Walk = 10 min
Drive = 3 min
Bike = 2 min

tarwheel 

My commute times vary a lot, whether by car or bike, depending on traffic, the weather, accidents and other factors. However, based on typical conditions, my round-trip commute takes about 130 minutes by bike and 60 minutes by car. So my TCQ would be 2.16666....

Wittyname

25 minute drive each way, or a 40 minute ride.

mcours2006

Nice!

cali_axela

Driving, including walking to my street-parked car ~2-4 blocks from my apartment, inching through horrific traffic, having to wait to park in a lot downtown, then having to find another parking spot near my apartment: ~70 minutes round trip on a good day (if there is such a thing, when being forced to drive in SF). Biking: ~20 minutes to work, ~25 home. So my ratio is somewhere around 0.65 I've driven to work a grand total of two times in the 14 months I've worked downtown. Both times were terrible.

San Pedro

How fast do you cruise at? I have a quite a bit more lights on my ride, and to get that average I need to cruise over 25mph, sometimes hitting 30mph on the flat roads (need a good tailwind or a truck to do that though). Jealous of your traffic lights per mile, that would not be possible in Japan.

hardboiled718

I calculated my TCQ at around 0.66. No car, so the alternative to biking is taking the bus, which including walking and waiting averages about 30 minutes. My ride on the bike takes about 20 min. One of the reasons I started biking to work was to get there faster, the added bonus of being able to avoid waiting for and riding crowded buses was icing on the cake.

ph0rk

~5 minutes cycling vs ~5 minutes on the motorcycle, give or take - a bit longer on the motorbike to get it out of the garage and moto parking is on the far side of the building, so parked-to-office takes longer. Or 10 minutes walking. Car parking would be similar to moto parking, but I don't have a car. In either case, spots are all gone unless you show up early.

Not sure the math works out when the commute distance is under one mile, but if your commute is that short you don't need a ratio to know that biking makes sense!

IrishBrewer

My speed varies as I try to ride for a constant effort and cadence rather than a specific speed. I do get over 30mph at times and down to 15 as well.

I have my GPS watch set to auto pause when my speed gets down below 4mph which only happens if I get stopped at a traffic light so this helps when that happens but I still loose a few tenths of a mph as a result of slowing down to a stop and coming back to speed. You'd think you would gain some back getting a bit of a rest but I think that when you get stopped, you also get out of your rhythm a bit so you don't really benefit from it.

I can also tell a big difference when a truck is going by in the same direction. Even being off on the shoulder, that helps a lot. I wish I could have one escort me all the way to work/home - I could probably avg about 25mph with that kind of a pull.

With the days getting shorter, now I also seem to be racing the sun trying to get home before it starts getting dark. I have front/rear lights but would need a couple more for safe night time riding.

RubeRad

I moved closer to work in order to be able to bike commute full time (50mi rt --> 11mi rt). I used to average 1hr in the car every day, now I average 1hr on the bike every day. Sure, on the odd day I could get to work in probably half the time (TCQ~2), but since I started full-time bike-commuting exactly when I moved, in my mind it's TCQ~1.

Also I now shower principally at work. I like to think of that as a savings to my CA water bill, but water is lumped into my exorbitant townhouse HOA fees... (grrr)

cdonges

Car 1 hour
Motorcycle 45 mins
Bike 4 hours! (35km and I am slow...)