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?
No comments:
Post a Comment