My goals for biking instead of driving in 2012 are to save money and improve my health. How does biking accomplish these goals? The first and most obvious benefit is that I save at least $.25 per mile that I bike instead of drive. The second obvious benefit is the ~600 calories I burn every day I bike to work.
Other Benefits:
- Improved health leads to lower health care costs.
- Biking instead of driving saves me the need for a gym membership.
- Biking to work reduces the opportunity to go out to lunch thus forcing me to bring my lunch to work.
- More free time comes by replacing my 25 minute driving commute with a 35 minute biking commute.
- More energy and focus throughout the day.
- With this level of exercise nearly every day, I am able to sleep better thus easily get up at 6am every day.
- If I am able to completely replace my car with a bike, supplemented by my wife’s car, I can get rid of my car and become a single vehicle family. This would be a big savings.
What gave me the idea and motivated me to start this quest and blog about it? This post from Mr. Money Mustache: The True Cost of Commuting. These numbers are incredible.
Adding 38 miles of round-trip driving at the IRS’s estimate of total driving cost of $0.51 per mile, there’s $19 per day of direct driving and car ownership costs. … At 80 minutes per day, the self-imposed driving would be adding the equivalent of almost an entire work day to each work week – so they would now effectively be working 6 days per week. … After 10 years, multiplied across two cars since they have different work schedules, this decision would cost them about $125,000 in wealth (if they had for example chosen to put the $19/day into extra payments on their mortgage), and 1.3 working years worth of time, EACH, spent risking their lives daily behind the wheel.
By his calculations, living 1 mile closer to work allows a person to purchase a home $15,900 more expensive than otherwise possible.
Might you talk a bit about where you store your bike and gear at work? Also, is there a shower at the office? We recently moved closer to my work, but I worry about aforementioned logistics. Thanks!
Hi Aunty Victoria, I’d be happy to talk about those things in upcoming posts. The short answers are: There is not a shower at my office. So far I haven’t needed one. I store my bike in the basement storage room. See my “Where will you park?” post.