Originally Posted by
buzzman
I will once again restate an assertion I made in another thread "True Cost of Commuting by Bike" that anyone who is under the impression that bicycling to work as opposed to driving is a "break even" proposition at best or even the more costly alternative would fail a basic home economics course- if that is the case for you then you're either screwing up the math, spending a lot of money unnecessarily or not really riding your bike to work with any regularity. For those of you still struggling with the economics of biking to work or understanding the true cost of ownership of an automobile and the true cost of commuting by bike here are some useful links:
http://www.edmunds.com/tco.html
From Klipingers'
And this site might be helpful-
http://andyjordans.com/page.cfm?pageID=207
Using the 2006 column from this chart:
I think one easy way to make my calculator more realistic yet keep it simple is the "Cost per mile" value. I'm not going to use $0.51 as one site suggested because I'm already factoring in the cost of fuel the day of each ride.
Using one chart that came up from
http://andyjordans.com/page.cfm?pageID=207 the cost showed 52.2 cents which includes 26 cents for fuel. Fifty-two dot two minus the 26 leaves 26.2 cents remaining. The chart shows 5.6 cents in Maint + Tires but does not give insight into what goes into the "Average Cost per 15,000...", "Variable Cost" and "Fixed Cost" so I don't know if it all applies to my situation. For instance my insurance costs won't lower, etc.
So.... I think I'll make up my own highly-scientific and research-intensive numbers until I hopefully see numbers that are more broken out. I'll double my 5.6 cents to give 11.2 cents. Ta-da! Science! That's probably more reliable than some research driven numbers I've seen.