Subject: Cities Turning to Bicycles
From: "Eric S. Sande"
Date: 9/16/2004 7:54 PM US Eastern Standard Time
Message-id:

Well, that's nice, but not everyone has bike friendly roads on the
route to work, or live close enough to commute to work.

Quite.

But assuming ideal (or semi ideal) conditions, I ran a back of the
envelope calculation on the average one way commute length (10 miles),
the average commute time (20 minutes), and the average cost of car
ownership (based on what got reported on CNN Money today).

Excluding parking costs and health benefits, as nearly as I can
determine, given the same hourly income for the car commuter and the
bicycle commuter, the break even point is 10 miles, assuming the
cyclist can average 15 mph.

Anything shorter than 10 miles, the cyclist wins.


yeah, but many people need a car for inclement weather, hauling goods, or doing
things such as gasp transporting their bikes somewhere, hauling a kayak, etc