BIKE: Back to Illich and the hours it takes to travel by car

[Mike Dahmus]

At 09:57 AM 11/25/2003 -0600, you wrote:
>don't think this is completely true.  Maintenance and gas do add up (my
>boss, for example, spends $350+ per *month* on gas and is probably not
>terribly atypical, living in far northern Hays county), and one does get
>an insurance break for not driving a lot.

The variable cost of gas on any particular commute to work is so low that 
it's hard to view it as any kind of economic incentive to bike. My current 
office is 4 miles west of 360 on 2222; roughly a 10-mile commute by car; 
and my car gets 20 mpg in typical usage now. Even with the fact that I have 
to buy super-premium, we're still talking about a whopping $1.50 per day.

I spend almost $1.50 per day on my bike. (considering fixed cost of 
maintenance over the year plus new tubes/tires for flats plus battery costs 
for the light, etc.)

So again, if you can't get rid of the car; you save almost nothing by 
leaving it in the garage on any particular day.

(Maintenance - hard to quantify. Remember; a lot of the recommended 
maintenance on a car is of the form "every N,000 miles or M months. Tires 
are about the only thing you can treat as a completely variable cost).

I responded offline to the mileage-based insurance issue; but the paragraph 
above seems to refer to the other type of mileage discount - the kind where 
you claim to be living within N miles of work. In my experience, this 
"break" cuts perhaps 5% off your insurance bill - again, a trivial amount 
of money compared to the fixed costs of having a car.

(Insurance on my Eclipse is about $1000/year; I don't have my policy handy 
but dimly remember about a 50 bucks savings for driving much less than 
average. Even with my recent lack of biking to work, I still drive less 
than most suburbanites - a rate of about 8,000 mpy right now).


---
Mike Dahmus
mdahmus 
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