Three Years, 12,000 Miles Later

Sometime in late March/early April, I will be kicking off my three year anniverary of riding my bike. In that time, I have accumulated over 12,200 miles on one bike or about 4,066 miles per year.

I decided to compile some very generalized statistics to show how much of a difference has been made from bike riding. There are some assumptions and very general concepts put into play here for sake of simplicity. I'm also rounding down to 12,000 miles.

12,000 miles
Let's assume the following:

1. All mileage was gained for commuting purposes (even though many were for joy riding).
2. Because a bike is used in the city, gas mileage would be decreased.
3. I am using our old secondary car (which has died and gone to heaven) because Leandra is using our main vehicle.

With the '94 Chevy Cavalier wagon, I think we got about 21 mpg in the city. To do that same mileage in that car, I would have need to use 571.4 gallons of gas. To pay for all of that gasoline in that three years, I would have spent:

• $1,657.06 (avg. gas cost of $2.90)
• $1,714.20 (avg. gas cost of $3.00)

For the sake of pollution, the EPA website provided some very general statistics based on passenger cars and light trucks. Oddly enough, they are based on yearly averages on 12,500 miles driven in a year, so this is a pretty close comparison. Should I have driven that mileage, I would have created the following emissions:

• 77.1 lbs. of hydrocarbons
• 575 lbs. of carbon monoxide
• 38.2 oxides of nitrogen
• 11,450 lb.s or carbon dioxide
  

From an exercise standpoint, I can safely say that my average speed is about 15.5 mph. It may be a little higher than that, but I think that is a safe number. With that in mind, I have spent 774 hours on my bike. In three years, there is a total of 26,280 hours, which means I have spent almost 3% of my time riding a bicycle.

Additionally, I believe that I burn an average of 500 calories per hour. This equals 38,700 calories that I have burned from bicycle riding. Because it takes 3,500 calories to either gain or lose a pound, the amount of calories that I have burned equal about to about an 11 lb. difference in weight (either loss or maintaining).