One Year, NO CAR!!

Hello loyal blog followers. It has finally come, my one year anniversary of saying goodbye to the old Pontiac Sunfire and hello to a life of bicycling in a city called Baltimore. Starting in February (Feb 9, 2011 to be specific), I began monitoring my bicycle mileage once a week. I'm a pretty data heavy, meticulous kind of guy so there was only 3 times in six months that I missed a week of recording. I had fun adding extra columns and seeing the data. For example, here's a chart of the total mileage I rode during 6 months:

It's a little bit misleading since the y-axis doesn't go to zero, but it is still hundreds of miles. To be more precise, from 2/9/2011 to 8/10/2011, I rode 619.5 miles. Now, I also am pretty meticulous about checking the car mileage and miles per gallon in my wife's car and a rough estimate of the average mpg that car gets is 23. If I use this as well as say a price per gallon of $3.54 (the average over the past 6 months), I can get some pretty interesting numbers. For instance, the total amount I saved just in mileage due to riding my bike is $95.35 for the past 6 months. Also I've saved the planet 26.93 gallons of gasoline in six months. I guess it's not a whole lot, but it's still something. Here's some daily averages: 3.5 miles per day, $.54 per day saved, and .15 gallons saved each day.

Now, if you remember from my post in February, there are a lot more expenses to owning a car than just gasoline. If we add in conservative estimates for insurance ($289), Oil change ($35), and parking ($20) then the total I've saved in six months from not owning a car is $439.35. Not too shabby. Also, this doesn't include other maintenance and repair costs.

This is enough savings to purchase a nice Tandem bike for my wife and I!

Happy Biking :)

Interesting Juxtopostion

There's a great article about how awesome it is to live without a car in Baltimore:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/features/green/bs-md-car-free-baltimore-20110726,0,4166778.story

The humorous, though also pretty tragic thing is that on the Sun's homepage the article just next to it is of a man fatally shot in parked car:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-city/bs-md-ci-shooting-car-20110727,0,776057.story

Hmm, is the Sun trying to tell us something? Thanks to Suzanne for pointing this out to me.

6 months No Car!

Hello devoted blog readers! Well I just passed the 6 month mark of my life without a car! To celebrate I decided to bring in my bike for a tune up. After the complete tune-up, and seeing how it was such a low cost, I thought i might try calculating the amount of savings my bike has saved me. The total costs for repair tonight (tuning, new cables, new brakes, new chain) was $133.89. Compare that just with the costs of replacing the brakes in a car! For comparison, the new battery I bought last year was $64.31. Also in May I payed $422.25 after the car overheated and had to replace the thermostat and the hoses.

Let's talk about other fees I've avoided these past 6 months. The big one is insurance, I used to pay $289 every 6 months. The other big one is gasoline. Now of course, I generally just ride my bike to work, which is about 3 miles round trip. Estimating the total number of times I've done this trip in the last 6 months, I'd say 4.5 days a week (taking into account vacation I guess), for 24 weeks (6 months x 4 weeks per month), for a total of 108 trips or 324 miles. My car got on average about 22 miles per gallon, and assuming $3 per gallon, the total saved from gasoline is $44. Now of course this doesn't include all the other times I rode my bike downtown, to friends houses, getting lunch, etc. As for oil changes, that would cost about $35 every 6 months. Parking I would tack on another $20 for 6 months (residential parking pass and random parking around town). Finally there's EZ pass, which even if I didn't use at all, would cost $1.5 a month, for a total of $9.

So let's total it up.

$289 (car insurance)
$44 (conservative estimate for gasoline)
$35 (Oil change)
$20 (parking)
+$9 (EZ pass)
--------
$397 !!!

And that's just 6 months! That's an extra $66 every month. Pretty cool. Also this is just a conservative estimate and doesn't include random repairs.

So the question remains, why doesn't everyone get rid of their car?