Originally Posted by
ScottCommutes
The dirty little secret that I have never seen discussed on these forums is the pennies per mile to ride a bike. Take everything bike related (including shop repairs, special underpants, shoes, parts, tools, upgrades, whole bikes, tires, etc) you ever bought over a certain time period, and divide by the number of miles you rode.
Many beginners no doubt have a $700 bike with 100 miles on it and are in the dollars per mile category.
Many others ride cheap bikes into the ground and are probably at $0.10 per mile. Even then, a 20 mile ride costs a couple of bucks worth of bike wear.
I would guess that many here are around $0.50 per mile, but I have no actual data.
Oh man, everything has a unit cost. You seem really intent on making cycle commuting into a prohibitively expensive undertaking.
So i just bought some nice shoes, they were on sale so only cost about $100. What a deal, I thought to myself! But then i realized that because i sit in a chair in front of my computer all day long at work, my per step cost for the shoes was astronomical! Like in the last few weeks of ownership, i probably walked like 100 steps in them. So $1 a step!
What a dirty little secret the manufacturers of work shoes hid from me! All of the sudden i realized that the "deal" was anything but!
But in all seriousness, we have a bad sample here. People who commute by bike and spend time writing about it in a bike forum are going to probably do it more elaborately than the 99% of people who lock up beater bikes outside the local train station overnight, and for whom spending nothing on the bike is a strategy to keep it from being stolen. But these "multimodal" commuters, who very conceivably ride 10 miles rt from the train station (Or who have another beater locked up at the station closer to home, so 10 miles rt on two bikes) are probably closer to the average commuter than anyone here. Especially anyone with a gear list like yours. And i can guarantee you they didn't spend 700 on their bikes. Like under 100 probably and then they didn't even "restore" or "restomod" a single thing, so their bikes actually cost 100.
People who are here are not a good representation of bike commuters. In my estimation, i could very well be wrong, since i am here.