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?

2 popped tires in 1 day

So on the way to work yesterday I had a popped tire. It was right before I got to the office so I didn't have to walk far. However, on the way home it was a long bike walk. I walked from my office to Twenty20 Cycling in Hampden (took about 25min). There I got a new tire and brought it home. At home I started replacing it and when I was pumping it up it exploded on me! It was so loud that the sound wave made our piano play every note. Fortunately it didn't hurt or have any permanent damage to my ears. I didn't understand what I did wrong, and still don't, but I went back to Twenty20 and got another one and tried a slightly different method of replacing it and it worked fine.

:)

stolen from here

Moonlight Madness

We just had an amazing baltimore bicycling event. It's called the Moonlight Madness Memorial bike ride. I'm not sure who it's in memory of, but I assume it's someone who was killed in a bicycle accident. The idea is perfect - get about 100 bicyclists together and just ride around the city. It shows everyone that there are many of us out here who ride on city streets and basically raises awareness and allows us all to have fun at the same time. Part of the route went through East Baltimore, which some of my friends thought was a really bad idea because of the crime, but it turned out fantastic. I rode some streets I'd never riden before and since there was so many of us there was really no danger. There were a lot of kids outside waving at us and stuff. It was a great ride overall.

Here's the website that had all the information:

http://www.socializr.com/event/465093292

Here's the route we took:

http://www.bikely.com/maps/bike-path/Moonlight-Madness-2010

I took some pictures with my iPhone and posted them on my flickr here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/eedanjo/sets/72157624687168445/

Living Better on Less

My dad sent me this article today in an email.

It's a great piece about many different ways to live better for less and he specifically sent me the article because there's a section on reducing the amount you use your car, or even going car free (page 4). It says it increases exercise, reduces stress, eliminates car costs (payments, gas, insurance, parking, maintenance), and helps to reduce smog and global warming. It's good to get a fresh reminder of all those fantastic reasons to bike more and drive less. Anybody else want to join me in my car-free quest?