Bicycling's hidden costs and savings

I got asked to be written up in the employee newsletter because I ride my bike to work. One of the questions was what advice I might give to someone who wanted to get to work by some means other than a car. I found myself writing not about any nuts and bolts of using a bicycle, but about why one might want to do so in the first place.

If a person wants to do something, he tends to find a way. If he doesn't want to do something, he finds a way not to. So one of my missions is to point out that there are real reasons to want to. Giving up a car for a bike is not necessarily a great sacrifice. I find that the more I do it, the more I want to and the less I want to use a car

One of those reasons came up today when I took the main commuter to the bike shop for a spring tune-up. The price will be about a hundred dollars. This will be the second tune-up since I bought the bike five years ago.

In the days when we had two kids in day care, we "needed" two cars on-line 24 hours a day seven days a week. They got a lot of use, and they would need repairs. Getting one in for repairs was sometimes a logistical mess, and the price would always be hundreds of dollars. After years of living that way, it seemed normal. As I have driven less, the car repairs have been less frequent. Today when I got the quote for the bike repair, I felt relief that it was "only" about a hundred dollars, and I could observe the contrast between that relief and the fear I felt waiting for the call from the car repair place with the inevitable news that I was in for another multi-hundred-dollar repair bill.

So using a bicycle instead of a car saves a small amount of money in the price of gasoline (which probably is used up in bike repairs) but it produces potentially bigger savings in the cost of car repairs that are not needed, or at least postponed. In addition, it reduces some subtle stress when a person knows that if his transportation breaks down, the price to fix it will not break the bank. And then, if a person has a couple spare bikes, the stress from the threat of being immobilized is reduced. A couple spare cars is not an option for an ordinary person.