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 :)
