Biking to work is more expensive than I thought

Biking to work is more expensive than I thought(medium.com)

15 points by dontmitch 10 years ago | 12 comments

munger 10 years ago |

Focuses on food replacement cost of calories burnt, which makes very little sense since author at their own acknowledgement does not account for cost of maintenance on car or bike, or better health.

If you're going to ignore all of those things, you may as well ignore the cost of food per calorie burnt as well, which would mean to ignore this article.

anotheryou 10 years ago | |

also: bigger dishes are cheaper and you just might eat more cheap carbs like noodles.

mikestew 10 years ago |

Yeah, it's a pretty weak effort. "Let me calculate these hidden costs for biking to work, while conveniently ignoring maintenance costs of a car." He admits to leaving that part out, but admission does not relieve him of the task. Cars are expensive to run, you don't just get to hand-wave that away.

tobltobs 10 years ago |

Apart of some neglected details, like the cost for car maintenance, it is still an interesting article imho, because I always also wondered about the additional cost for eating, but was to lazy to calculate it myself.

schoen 10 years ago | |

When I saw this, I was guessing at first that the author had confused physics calories with nutritional calories; they differ by a factor of 1,000 and cause many back-of-the envelope calculations like this to come out the wrong way. For example, there was someone who had calculated that the caloric content of a scotch and soda was negative and so consuming them should cause weight loss. But the hidden flaw was that the energy required to melt the ice and warm up the liquid was actually in physical calories (which are tiny), while the energy supplied by metabolizing the alcohol was in nutritional calories (which are huge).

http://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/11/16/the-mensa-diet/

In this case, the author doesn't give his measured power output but I took a look at

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Energy_inp...

and concluded that the cited number of (nutritional) calories is the right order of magnitude, so the author's estimate is physically plausible and didn't involve a mistake about the two meanings of "calorie". The factor that Wikipedia notes that I might have neglected is about muscular efficiency: you can only actually use a fraction of the food energy you metabolize in order to move yourself around.

On the other hand, you can get this much food energy by eating about 120 g olive oil or about 200 g peanut butter. The peanut butter (choosing a random bottle from the front page of Amazon.com) offers 1213 kcal/dollar, a big improvement over the author's 205 kcal/dollar average.

I would also point out that if you're substituting at the margin, you don't have to think about "how terrible would it be if I had to eat only peanut butter all the time to save money?"; you just have to think about "how terrible would it be if I had to eat a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter per day to power my commute?", which doesn't sound that terrible to me.

jdietrich 10 years ago |

The article isn't terribly serious, but I'll bite anyway.

The IRS and GSA private vehicle mileage rate for 2016 is 54c. The federal government believes this to be a representative cost for a mile driven in a typical private car, inclusive of maintenance and capital depreciation. By that figure, the real cost of a 34 mile round trip is $18.36.

The US doesn't provide tax deductions for bicycle travel, but the UK does. The rate set by HMRC is 20p per mile, equivalent to 28 cents. This figure is inclusive of maintenance, depreciation, third-party insurance, clothing and accessories. Accordingly, the cost of a 34 mile round trip is $9.52. The average cost of living is significantly higher in the UK than the US, so this should be seen as a generous figure.

Even after adding the OP's calculated food costs, cycling comes out as considerably cheaper than driving. There is also the broader issue of the typical Western diet, which contains a significant excess of calories.

reversecs 10 years ago | |

one could also factor in time. At work your time costs money and if driving allowed you to spend an extra hour working, assuming you were paid hourly, you could work one additional hour. in the case of salaried perhaps you performance would rise.

but I don't really like the idea of sacrificing exercise for additional hours at work.

jdietrich 10 years ago | | |

By the same token, you could factor in the costs of ill health and premature death due to a sedentary lifestyle. Commuting by bicycle is a very time-efficient way of getting cardiovascular exercise.

castratikron 10 years ago |

I'll bite..you say you spend 950 calories on the round trip on a bike, but how many calories do you spend on the round trip in your car? You need to count that as well.

The link at the bottom seems to think that you spend 17 calories to drive 15 minutes. If a round trip is 36 miles, and you drive 1 mile per minute, you spend (17/15)*36 = 41 calories to drive 36 miles.

So the cost of driving is really the cost of gasoline ($4.08) plus the cost of food (which is 41/205 = $0.20), $4.28.

http://calorielab.com/burned/?mo=se&gr=16&ti=Transportation&...

fractalwrench 10 years ago |

$1 per 250 calories seems fairly expensive, I'm sure it's possible to reduce that costs by choosing cheaper meals, or even eating less for those of us who have fuel reserves.

Maintenance and replacing worn-out parts have been the biggest expense for my bike. If you count time spent on repairs/general care, then things can get pricey very quickly.

tobltobs 10 years ago | |

If you use your bike everyday the biggest cost factor will be chains, cockset and sprocket. Those modern 10 or 11 sprocket cocksets require smaller chains which wear of faster then snow smelts in the sun. You are lucky if you can use them for longer than 3000km. If you can downgrade to an old XT with an Uniglide (UG) chains you can save money as those will be ok for up to 25000km.

humbleMouse 10 years ago |

If biking to work is too expensive - you're doing it wrong.

edit: Just read the blog post. It sucks.