Originally Posted by
RubeRad
When I jumped into bike commuting, my strategy was to let my car live at work. I am in a good situation at work where we have our own parking deck, it's free, it's safe, it's out of the sun. I park way up on the 4th floor where I'm not hogging anybody's 'good spot'. With 3 kids, once in a while we run into that calendar situation where 2 drivers have to be in 2 very different places at the same time. Usually we know well in advance, but even if it comes up suddenly, I have the car at work, and can go do a pickup or something. (I can leave my bike safely locked up at work overnight and ride it home the next day).
Now since the family minivan lives at home, I still have that temptation and far too often resort to it for errands that are easily in biking distance. But in terms of getting from being a 2-car family to a 1.1 car family, this strategy has been very successful. In 2014 my car drove only I think 833 miles. This year I think I'm over 1000, but each year since I started this, I've put fewer miles onto that car than I do on the bike.
That's cool man. In my case I'm up to over 3,500 yearly cycling miles, and my car is down to just 7,500 miles a year. Compare that to a high of 36,000 miles a year back when I was just out of college 12 years ago, and driving 100 miles a day for work. Same car, in fact.
I'm about to convert my utility bike to e-assist, mainly for grocery hauling or other around-town uses where otherwise it might be a bit too slow/far on the bike, but with e-assist it might make things more feasible. And hopefully, I'll be able to do some work commutes with it where I would normally use the car, because of being tired from commuting on the road bike the previous day.