Up until mid way through last year I commuted 33k each way back and forth from work. I have a car and live in Japan so public transport is also readily available. If you are going to do this kind of distance you need a decent bicycle but that doesn’t mean going ape with the latest and greatest in carbon fiber. I have a good bike with components and wheels that are on the bottom end of higher quality stuff. (Scott Aluminum Frame, Carbon Fork, Shimano 105 Components for the cyclists out there) I paid roughly 2,000 USD for it originally and in the first year I put about 300 USD into it in maintenance but it seemed to find a groove after a while where everything just worked and worked well for 5000 plus km before any noteworthy maintenance was necessary.

Economically I approached the project (and my wife) with the argument that the train was roughly 9USD per day which I rounded conveniently up to 10USD so I could look at 250 days and a free bicycle. That passed the wife test and I am pretty confident it worked out to my advantage financially.

We also have a car and the tolls, gas and parking per day are pretty good when you want to justify a fairly pricey bike. Parking is 10US per day, tolls 8USD per day, and gas somewhere around 8USD per day again Japan so all the whining in North America is laughable. We have been paying these prices for years. Call the auto commute 25 dollars per day and even a decent road bike is looking like a couple of months of commuting and it was free.

I agree that a good bicycle is a “normal good” most of the time because not many people are going to really commit to a bicycle commute. That said, assuming the gas prices stay where they are, I expect we may see more people making the commitment and actually using the bicycle to their financial advantage.

One thing not to be overlooked is that energy costs no matter whether it comes from engines or your legs. I use a heart rate monitor most of the time. One piece of useful information these provide is how many calories you burn during a ride. Cycling is one of the most efficient methods for converting human energy to personal speed and you can burn up some serious fuel on a fast and furious ride that your body becomes completely conditioned to executing 2x daily.

I would average 29 kph, and arrive to work in just under an hour. In the process I would burn 1,000 Calories on the way in and 1,000 Calories on the way home. Now being in education, I had access to showers and a buffet lunch meal plan which I exploited to the maximum. Had I not I would have eaten so much at home that my wife might have started to add that to the total expense of this lifestyle throwing off my solid financial reasoning.

I really enjoyed the idea presented in this blog about cycles as an normal good in comparison to an inferior good. I would offer it depends on how the person uses it. In my case, I am certain the bike saved us money so in that case inferior it is.

Further complicating things though, my resting heart rate is still down below 50 and my body mass index has increased only 3% in the 20 years since I was sixteen so I think that will keep me out of the hospital more than others as we age and die. Maybe I won’t be a financial burden on society in my old age but…I was hit twice and whether due to experience (cycling for years) or luck (lucky for years) I wasn’t hurt badly enough for even so much as a band aid. Without a trace of ego as I say this, I think the statistics would change if everybody was out there spinning pedals.

I choose to ride with buses, taxis, scooter, motorcycles and cars over the sidewalk because of their relative predictabilty compared to the average person walking down the street not to mention riding a two wheeled object that has “been idle for years.” The very thought of everyone on bikes makes me want to take up driving.

.. here is me on world tour … on my unicycle at Eiffel Tower .. cycling must be good for ???

http://tinyurl.com/4xt4le

You also need to consider how availability of other modes of transit factors in…I can choose to drive and park ($11 to park, approximately $8 gas), or walk 3/4 mile to a $10.50 train ride, or drive to a $3 lot and $10 train, or bike to a $10 train. Additionally, there are the costs of frustration and aggravation with driving, frustration and delay (train), extreme aggravation at missing train, crisis of not being able to get home from work quickly (train), and delay/aggravation of flat tire or bike crash.

Few of these costs are as predictable as gas and parking; e.g. weather unpredictability and inconvenience also plays a role. So for me, the choice of bike, train or car is complicated, but usually boils down to an issue of time and schedule + weather, more than gas cost. But I am an edge case! It would be interesting to see if an economic model could sort out the “noise” in all that to make any generalizations. Most people don’t have as many options as I do, so I think in some cases the increasing gas costs could be isolated and perhaps would tip some people into investigating alternatives.