Using my basic cost calculator and the bill I just got from my LBS I am going to have to commute 43 legs (one leg = one way to or from work) to break even. I'm not calculating in the health benefits just simple out of pocket costs/savings. I'm using the cost of gas for today to calculate.

I actually don't save that much my biking because I try to keep all of my expenses cheap.

I have a 1995 Audi A4 w/60k miles that I bought for 3k€. It gets used about once per month for a round trip to the extended family (about 500 miles) ... which costs about 130€. The maintenance is minimal and insurance/registration runs about 1000€ year.

The bicycle was 799€ and throw in a helmet and lock and it's around 900€. I run my old clothes when I ride it.

The subway is subsidized by my work and I get a full city pass (including airport) for 26€/mo.

I guess all my expenses are low (except for my 2000 USD/mo student loan payments.)

Sounds like you need to learn to turn some bolts??

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

No truer words have ever been spoken.

I'll go read that when I get home but as I've also stated this is a simplistic calculator knowing I'm ignoring many other factors. I'm doing nothing more than showing basic money spent versus money saved in a few categories.

My bike is already fully depreciated.
I don't pay parking.
My insurance isn't going to go lower.
I'm ignoring vehicle tire wear, less oil changes, etc. because I choose to for my purposes.
And on and on.

Again this is just a small calculator. I'll expand it as time goes on and will certainly start to include some of the things you have linked into. I may lose interest in expanding it as I'm going to commute as much as I can regardless of what the calculator show.

Thanks for the links... again I'll dive into them later tonight.

Using the 2006 column from this chart:
http://andyjordans.com/images/librar...vcost_08_p.gif

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.

WonderMonkey, Just for clarification- when I wrote, "if that is the case for [you] then you're either screwing up the math..." The "you" in this case was not directed at you as the OP but to the general reader and, particularly, those readers that are somehow under the assumption that riding a bike to work has to be a rather expensive proposition.

The variables involved in computing the actual costs of transporting oneself to work/school can be extrapolated into all kinds of complexities (including the costs of Clif bars for a cyclist's ride or the Starbuck's or egg Macmuffin the driver grabs for the drive in every morning) and can be extremely individualized based on the specific commute and commuter. But at it's most basic, general level it is probably 5 x's more expensive, on average, to commute by private auto than it is by bike- even when the commuter owns a car that sits unused in the driveway while they commute to work on their bike.

The posts that astound me are the ones that claim to drive a perfectly running car, which was given to them and for which they pay minimal insurance costs, never breaks down and their commute has no tolls, no parking fees and for some inexplicable reason their employer subsidizes their drive. They then go on to assert that it costs far less to drive than riding their $3500 carbon fiber bike, on their $120 tires that wear out every 500 miles, wearing their full cycling kit, which must be laundered daily or they have several sets, and they must be "fueled" by special nutrients harvested in remote mountain lakes in South America... and that this set of factors somehow applies to everyone, world wide who rides a bike for transportation.:rolleyes:

Sure. Thanks for clarifying but I didn't take it as any sort of attack or anything. I figure that as long as I capture whatever it is that I spend commuting that I WOULD NOT HAVE driving that is a cost. That's the easy part and includes the Cliff Bars or the beans grown in the intestines of a Yak in some mountain, etc. However a rack for the rear of my bike to hold a change of clothing and shower junk IS included. The hard part is the actual cost of driving to work. I'm going to keep it simple yet look for ways to be as complete as possible. A round figure per mile is in line with my "simple" approach.... I just have to find a realistic figure. For now I'll use the one I came up with and then improve it as I move forward.

Nohing that will add anything to the current conversation, but just a thought that came to me. It might be useful to add a column to the chart with your actual bike expenses (that you could add to as you have new ones). then you could put in a calculation to divide your total bike related costs by the miles ridden to see your total cost per mile (however you choose to define it). In fact, that sounds like something I might do this evening. In addition to knowing the savings versus the car, it would be kind of cool to watch that # decrease (hopefully) over time as the miles add up.

Yes that would be good. I'll add that on my summary page. Do you want my spreadsheet or are you going to do your own?

when I used to train for races I had a little mantra I would sometimes repeat under my breath as I rode- "the more I ride the faster I get, the faster I get the more I ride..." maybe for commuting I should change it to- "the more I ride the cheaper it gets, the cheaper it gets the more I ride..."

Using my new spreadsheet it will take 31 legs to recover commuting related costs.

Or "The more I ride the more camping gear I can buy...".

The way I'm looking at it, people choose to bike commute for one of these two reasons:

1) It saves money for their situation and point of view
2) It just feels good, with or without any scrutiny of the costs

For me it's the second one. If I factored in the amount of overtime pay I'm sacrificing by bike commuting (once or twice a week, 20 miles each way) then there's no way I could conclude that I'm saving money. But OTOH, doing this is a great way to get in some riding during the week which I otherwise wouldn't be able to do.

I'm primarily your reason #2. I'm layering on your reason #1 just to get a rough idea and I like doing things like that.

If you don't mind sharing yours, I'd appreciate it. You can email it to mk313 at me dot com

Thanks,

How do you factor in health benefits?

It costs me several thousand a year to commute (opportunity costs of the extra time spent) but I'd continue to do it even if cars and gasoline were free, because the benefits to my mental and physical health are huge.

It's my opinion (backed by nothing in particular) that most of the people on this forum are not commuting because they can't afford to drive, they're doing it for some other reason than money.

Sent.

The only way you could even come close to factoring in health costs is that if you know you have medical costs and they clearly go away or reduce as you become healthier.

Yeah, I prefer to just stay healthy. Actually you could probably estimate it statistically. In fact it has been done, I don't know about dollar-wise but there was a study that indicated that the health benefits of cycling outweighed the danger of getting killed/injured by 20:1. You may be able to extrapolate that into dollars if you went to the original study and figured out what health problems were avoided, and how much living with heart disease for 15 years costs.

Sure, some people wouldn't get heart disease anyway. But with the US health system the way it is these days, if you're one of the people who avoid it due to exercise, you probably just avoided a few hundred thousand dollars worth of medical expenses at least, not to mention whatever price tag you care to attach to being healthy for 15 years rather than being unable to be physically active and having to spend time in hospitals, etc.

Actually now that I think of it, I can give a slight input to that. I stopped riding for 4 months last winter in order to concentrate on other things. After only 5 or 6 weeks my blood pressure (taken during a blood drive) was so high that the nurses kicked my ass out of the blood drive with a note for my doctor and made me promise to go there the next day.

I did and I went onto medications immediately.

Now that I'm about 8 weeks back on my bike, I've stopped the meds several weeks ago (I test my BP daily and my doctor is OK with me altering my dosage as needed) and my blood pressure and resting pulse are both far lower than they were even on the highest med dosage that I ever got to.

I'm also losing weight, which is helping the blood pressure as well. I was never able to lose weight before I started cycling.

If you use non-insurance-copay numbers, I was looking at $250/year for a couple of office visits, another $200/year for tests, and $720/year for meds. That's for a very mild and cheaply treatable condition, but one that, if left untreated could lead to renal failure which is another way of saying "slowly dying" and destroys quality of life.

If you start getting into the fact that exercise has been shown to reduce the chances of everything from diabetes to cancer, the benefits could easily run into tens of thousands a year per person.

I started doing local errands on the bike this year and haven't given much thought to the cost-benefit vs. driving. I did however splurge on a new Timbuk2 so I have another 120 ish miles to 'pay it off' in gas savings. I like the feeling of having run around all day goofing off and having left the truck in the garage all day :-)

Time spent on the bike vs. at the office or at hoem with family. No offense, but my drive is 20 mins (highway) and my ride is two hours (lots of hills). I still do it, but you have to factor that in.

I'll admit it here, personally that time is on the plus side. The time spent driving, invariably annoying me or at the very least keying me up if even a small degree, has to be a loss.

A guy on another thread was way high on his "cost of commuting" and got a little bent out of shape about it, but he is right about one thing: Given a choice, we generally do it if we enjoy it and not for the savings. And however we most enjoy doing it, with the equipment we feel like paying for. It doesn't have to cost much more than, well, nothing, but the more you want to enjoy it train or branch out into other cycling pursuits the more it costs.

haha that was me. but bent out of shape? :/

And allez3 I totally agree with the time thing. But to counter my negative thinking I remember how when I was visiting DC for a medical forum I saw people commute 1-2 hours one way just to get to work.

Since there is no monetary amount that can be assigned to this it can't be factored into a spreadsheet.

I'm probably in the middle on that in that I won't buy the equipment if I don't feel like I've earned it through gas savings, etc. There is a 'minimum' I'll purchase like blinkie light, etc. for safety or the law but other things I have to justify to myself. The wife says "get it" but I don't like letting go of the wallet like that.

If I had a choice in a commute time of 20 minutes by motor vehicle or 2 hours by bicycle, the motor vehicle would win hands down every time. I can factor in the cost difference in my personal time lost, in which I could be doing home/vehicle repairs other than paying someone else to do it, plus the added cost of bike maintenance/wear.

I still get amused by posts claiming that one can have (what I consider) a full on year round commute, and be able to only spend 50 dollars or less a year on bicycle maintenance.

Well you seemed a little adamant let's say, but I just wanted to make sure you got credit for the excellent points if anyone cared to check that thread. I think I personally couldn't commute much more than an hour each way but if someone enjoyed it that much, I can see how they'd consider it a positive. Someone said they commute and also train for example, to the tune of 15,000 miles per year. That's more than double what I do and some people think I'm crazy ... it's all relative. Basically I can't see charging that time to the cost of commuting if I'd be riding that much anyway. Equipment, I think you have to look at it the same way.