
Biking to work is more expensive than I thought - dontmitch
https://medium.com/life-learning/the-economics-of-biking-to-work-ae0f15a36636
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munger
Focuses on food replacement cost of calories burnt, which makes very little
sense since author at their own acknowledgement does not account for cost of
maintenance on car or bike, or better health.

If you're going to ignore all of those things, you may as well ignore the cost
of food per calorie burnt as well, which would mean to ignore this article.

~~~
anotheryou
also: bigger dishes are cheaper and you just might eat more cheap carbs like
noodles.

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mikestew
Yeah, it's a pretty weak effort. "Let me calculate these hidden costs for
biking to work, while conveniently ignoring maintenance costs of a car." He
admits to leaving that part out, but admission does not relieve him of the
task. Cars are expensive to run, you don't just get to hand-wave that away.

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tobltobs
Apart of some neglected details, like the cost for car maintenance, it is
still an interesting article imho, because I always also wondered about the
additional cost for eating, but was to lazy to calculate it myself.

~~~
schoen
When I saw this, I was guessing at first that the author had confused physics
calories with nutritional calories; they differ by a factor of 1,000 and cause
many back-of-the envelope calculations like this to come out the wrong way.
For example, there was someone who had calculated that the caloric content of
a scotch and soda was negative and so consuming them should cause weight loss.
But the hidden flaw was that the energy required to melt the ice and warm up
the liquid was actually in physical calories (which are tiny), while the
energy supplied by metabolizing the alcohol was in nutritional calories (which
are huge).

[http://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/11/16/the-mensa-
diet/](http://www.futilitycloset.com/2008/11/16/the-mensa-diet/)

In this case, the author doesn't give his measured power output but I took a
look at

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Energy_inp...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance#Energy_input)

and concluded that the cited number of (nutritional) calories is the right
order of magnitude, so the author's estimate is physically plausible and
didn't involve a mistake about the two meanings of "calorie". The factor that
Wikipedia notes that I might have neglected is about muscular efficiency: you
can only actually use a fraction of the food energy you metabolize in order to
move yourself around.

On the other hand, you can get this much food energy by eating about 120 g
olive oil or about 200 g peanut butter. The peanut butter (choosing a random
bottle from the front page of Amazon.com) offers 1213 kcal/dollar, a big
improvement over the author's 205 kcal/dollar average.

I would also point out that if you're substituting _at the margin_ , you don't
have to think about "how terrible would it be if I had to eat only peanut
butter all the time to save money?"; you just have to think about "how
terrible would it be if I had to eat a couple of spoonfuls of peanut butter
per day to power my commute?", which doesn't sound that terrible to me.

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jdietrich
The article isn't terribly serious, but I'll bite anyway.

The IRS and GSA private vehicle mileage rate for 2016 is 54c. The federal
government believes this to be a representative cost for a mile driven in a
typical private car, inclusive of maintenance and capital depreciation. By
that figure, the real cost of a 34 mile round trip is $18.36.

The US doesn't provide tax deductions for bicycle travel, but the UK does. The
rate set by HMRC is 20p per mile, equivalent to 28 cents. This figure is
inclusive of maintenance, depreciation, third-party insurance, clothing and
accessories. Accordingly, the cost of a 34 mile round trip is $9.52. The
average cost of living is significantly higher in the UK than the US, so this
should be seen as a generous figure.

Even after adding the OP's calculated food costs, cycling comes out as
considerably cheaper than driving. There is also the broader issue of the
typical Western diet, which contains a significant excess of calories.

~~~
reversecs
one could also factor in time. At work your time costs money and if driving
allowed you to spend an extra hour working, assuming you were paid hourly, you
could work one additional hour. in the case of salaried perhaps you
performance would rise.

but I don't really like the idea of sacrificing exercise for additional hours
at work.

~~~
jdietrich
By the same token, you could factor in the costs of ill health and premature
death due to a sedentary lifestyle. Commuting by bicycle is a very time-
efficient way of getting cardiovascular exercise.

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castratikron
I'll bite..you say you spend 950 calories on the round trip on a bike, but how
many calories do you spend on the round trip in your car? You need to count
that as well.

The link at the bottom seems to think that you spend 17 calories to drive 15
minutes. If a round trip is 36 miles, and you drive 1 mile per minute, you
spend (17/15)*36 = 41 calories to drive 36 miles.

So the cost of driving is really the cost of gasoline ($4.08) plus the cost of
food (which is 41/205 = $0.20), $4.28.

[http://calorielab.com/burned/?mo=se&gr=16&ti=Transportation&...](http://calorielab.com/burned/?mo=se&gr=16&ti=Transportation&wt=150&un=lb&kg=68)

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fractalwrench
$1 per 250 calories seems fairly expensive, I'm sure it's possible to reduce
that costs by choosing cheaper meals, or even eating less for those of us who
have fuel reserves.

Maintenance and replacing worn-out parts have been the biggest expense for my
bike. If you count time spent on repairs/general care, then things can get
pricey very quickly.

~~~
tobltobs
If you use your bike everyday the biggest cost factor will be chains, cockset
and sprocket. Those modern 10 or 11 sprocket cocksets require smaller chains
which wear of faster then snow smelts in the sun. You are lucky if you can use
them for longer than 3000km. If you can downgrade to an old XT with an
Uniglide (UG) chains you can save money as those will be ok for up to 25000km.

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humbleMouse
If biking to work is too expensive - you're doing it wrong.

edit: Just read the blog post. It sucks.

