Irontwit

It seems a bit odd to be writing a post about leaving your car at home and riding to work in the middle of the biggest freeze since 1981, but a fellow blogger has been bemoaning the cost of cycling (see Redbikes), and in particular having a dig at this poster published by Manchester based Loveyourbike. Loveyourbike is a cycling campaign run by Manchester Friends of the Earth of which I’ve been a (totally inactive) member for several years.

I feel a degree of sympathy with Redbikes, after all, buying a decent quality SRAM chain for my bike cost me just over £40 the other week. But, is he right about savings being illusory? Let’s have a look at the figures:

Example:

Cost of owning, taxing, insuring a small diesel car, value £12,000 = £2,353 per annum assuming you are using finance to purchase the car. If you financed for a 3 year period then the total cost to keep such a vehicle legally on the road (without driving it anywhere) would be £7.059

Now add to that the running costs. If I drove for 5,000 miles per annum it would cost me approximately 15.8p per mile, an additional £790 per annum. Thus, the total cost of running such a vehicle over 3 years would be £9,429 or £3,143 per year: the cost of a pretty high spec road bike, the likes of which Lance Armstrong would be happy to ride.

If you owned such a vehicle outright and you intended to drive it to its grave (i.e. not sell it on and ignore the annual depreciation, the cost of running such a car would be £1,349 per year, still quite a decent bike in value.

Source of figures: AA running costs tables

Thus, if I ignore the purchase cost and depreciation, riding a bicycle instead of a car will save you £1350 per year minus the cost of servicing the bike and extra clothing etc, or over £3,000 per year if you’re having to finance the cost of a car.

For most people, though, owning both a car and a bicycle is the most likely situation, and this makes the scenario a little more complex. At the moment, I’m only commuting to work by bike on one day a week (as a consultant I work all over the northwest) and based upon my car’s running costs (medium sized diesel), I’m saving approximately £5.84 per 20 mile commute or, if I include car cost and depreciation etc, £21 per commute ( I own the car outright and will keep it going until scrap). So, if I commute 38 times per year (term times) I will save £222 per year by commuting once a week – coming nowhere near the cost of servicing  and spares for my road bike.

That’s not the whole story, though. How much better do I feel for commuting by bicycle? How much is my health benefiting? And, how much CO2 emmissions am I saving by commuting?

So, owning a bike and a car doing the occasional commute by bike is actually going to cost me more than owning a car alone. There are big savings to be made if you can do as we did and go down from a 2 car family to a one car family, or better still ditching car ownership altogether, but, if you think you’ll save money by commuting by bike on the odd day you’re going to be disappointed. If you can manage a cycle commute on 2 or 3 days a week or more then you’ll probably be saving more than the cost of your bicycle and associated servicing.