Topping the list must be the notion that one person’s time is worth more than another’s, and that this difference in value can be determined by looking at the vehicle that one drives.
For example, a 55-year old brain surgeon and an 18-year old frat boy are waiting at a light. Each of these travelers chose his vehicle for the day based on what he determined to be “the fastest way.” Which person’s time is more valuable?
The Evidence Provided: The surgeon is driving a 35-dollar, three-speed bike, and the frat boy is driving an 85,000-dollar SUV.
Aside from being wholly conscious that one's vehicle choice may also be made in part to say things about oneself, there is the following math problem:
A more accurate figure for average speed of your car includes the time spent in service to the car. To calculate that, start with the dollar figure spent on ownership and maintenance for the last year. Take the hours working to earn that number of dollars and add it to the number of hours you spent actually operating the vehicle. Divide that number of hours into the number of miles driven in the same time period.
The American Automobile Association reported a while back that the average American household pays $9000 per year to own and operate the average car. That seems excessive, but there are a lot of people driving expensive late-model cars to offset all those clunkers.
If I pay a measly $4000 to own and maintain a car for a year, and make $40,000 per year, it takes me one tenth of my working hours for that year to pay for the car. Assuming full-time employment at fifty weeks per year and forty hours per week, or 2000 hours working per year, that's 200 hours per year to pay for the car. That's five weeks of work. If I make twice the salary, and drive that average car, that's still eleven percent of my working time, or 225 hours, to pay for it.
If I drive that car 15,000 miles in that year, and go twenty-five miles an hour the entire time the car is in operation, that's 600 hours. Add the 200 hours it takes to earn the money to pay for the car, and the average speed is not 25 but rather 18.75. The higher-paid me driving the average car averages 18.2 miles an hour.
The odometer is the default device for determining the amount of wear and tear on a car. Few cars used in America have Hobbs meters that tell us how much time the car is actually used, making the above calculations a bit tougher for the average person. Claiming that one spends all one's time driving on roads with speed limits of, say, forty-five miles an hour is specious, as this ignores traffic lights, slowed traffic due to the range of causes common on such roads, and getting to and from such a road from one's residence, among other factors.
Considering, for a moment, a bicycle as the primary vehicle, and factoring in any bicycle-specific clothing and accessories purchased in the time period, and perhaps even clothing that is primarily worn while cycling but not at other times, the math gets interesting. I have a 1974 Raleigh 3-speed that I bought for $25 in 2008. Since that time, I've spent a fair bit on rehabilitation--the bike came to me third- or fourth-hand, and had suffered a fair bit of neglect if not outright abuse. I've also installed lights and some home-built reflectors on the bike to make it more useful for me. At retail prices (I was working for Bluegrass Bicycle when I did most of the work to this bike), I probably did six hundred dollars or so worth of work to the bike. If we call the purchase price as rehabbed $700, and figure twenty bucks worth of tubes, cables, and brake pads per year, I've spent about $800 on the bike in the five years I've had it, or $160 per year.
I've logged my miles on that bike, and log entries for the last year or so have included more accurate trip times (I finally got a cyclometer for it a year or so ago). My usual rolling average speed on that bike is 13 miles an hour (rounded). If we keep with that above employment assumption of $20 per hour, it takes me eight hours to pay for the bike for a year. My logs shows that I spent about 43 hours riding that bike the 570 miles I put on it last year. According to the calculations, I spent 51 hours riding and paying for this bike, for an average speed of 11 miles an hour.
Compared to the less than 19 miles an hour average for the car, that's not a big difference. If I had chosen to ride that bike more out of the 4000 miles, say, half of the time, my average speed on the bike would be over 12 miles an hour. If I had ONLY ridden the Raleigh, excluding other bikes all year, my average speed would have been 12.7 (rounded to tenths).
The most cycling I've done in one year was 8000 miles, in 2011. My average speed for that year was 13.77 miles an hour. I don't know what I spent on bicycles that year, or the amortization on those bikes and parts and accessories. If I figure the amortization on five years of ownership for all purchases, just to make math easier, and assume the money spent to be $2000, it's $400 a year. That's half a week's work in the income assumption above, at 20 hours. 13.5 miles an hour.
I haven't included calculations for time that might be spent exercising separately from driving the car that is offset by the exercise of driving the bike. The salary figures were chosen for simplicity, and do not reflect my actual income.
"Your Mileage May Vary," as the expression goes.
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