Riding my bike to save gas
Sunday, August 10th, 2008Although the price of gas has dropped a little bit over the past few weeks, it is still really expensive to fill up. Here in Seattle, premium gas is over $4.30/gallon. For me, this means that I am paying $.24 per mile to drive my car. While there are a lot of trips where driving a car simply makes more sense, I am starting to find that there are quite a few trips that can be just as easily traveled by bicycle.
In order to assist me, I have a speedometer on my bike to assist me in calculating my distance. To be specific, the bicycle computer that I use is the Sigma 906. It currently retails for $22.98 at Pricepoint.com. It is a pretty simply bicycle computer. It is nothing too fancy, but it takes care of the essential functions like trip and total distance, current speed, max speed and average speed. My only gripe is that I haven’t been able to find an easy way to reset all of the values of a trip. If I erase the trip distance, the trip time will remain active. Because of this I have to go through and manually reset every statistic.
Anyway, I am using this bicycle computer to help me to track how much I have saved on riding my bike. So far I have ridden 16.82 miles, which has saved me $4.04. This isn’t much, but it can add up over a course of a year depending on how much I actually ride. For the most part I am able to keep up with traffic and Seattle does a good job of providing bike lanes and other places to ride. I would be a bit quicker if I had a road bike instead of a mountain bike, and slick tires instead of knobby treaded ones. So far I have ridden to the book store, the drug store, and my girlfriends place and back.
The best part is even if I am not saving money, I am still getting some exercise in the process.