Originally Posted by
Dan The Man
Car vs Bicycle depends on how you define your goals. One is faster than the other so is that time money, as in will you have to take unpaid days off of work to cover the time you lose, or is that time just down time, or is it vacation time. Will you pay to exercise if you aren't biking? Either way, you should subtract the base cost of food from the analysis because you are paying for that either way.
Minus say $100 per week of food/daily living expenses that you pay no matter what you are doing, bicycling is pretty close to free. All your marginal expenses are bike repair and extra calories to cover cycling. If you choose to camp for free, then your living expenses are covered.
True, but you do eat more when riding 80 or whatever miles per day. There is a pretty good chance that you are also buying a lot of sport drinks. Then there is the fact that you are likely to be buying food snacks and drinks in convenience stores and or small town general stores where the prices are inflated.
Also there is stuff that is actually consumable like tires, brake pads, bar tape and so on. For example lets say that you buy 2 tires for $43 and they last 4000 miles. If you ride 80 miles per day that works out to $3.44 per day just for tires. That doesn't even take into account tubes and patches. In practice I gave generally paid more (due to buying tires on tour from a local shop) and gotten less miles than that out of a set of tires.
I don agree with Tom Cotter's premise, but he does have a point that is isn't always as cheap as we tend to say it is.
It is the same with many of our hobbies and sports. I was appalled when I added up what my trail running costs me per year or per mile. Even running shoes work out to $.25 per mile assuming $100 per pair and a 400 mile lifespan. At least my bike shoes while more expensive last quite a few thousand miles.
All that said bicycling, running, and similar activities are well worth the expense IMO and are much cheaper than a lot of other activities that I might do if I wasn't doing them.