I kept track of my driving mileage this last year here, and my biking mileage here. I drove (that is, I was the driver of a vehicle) for 5,056.1 miles and bought 152.341 gallons of gasoline. I bicycled 837.52 miles during the same year, almost entirely in just-under-two-mile-each-way commutes to school.
That means, according to the .28 calories per mile per pound of body weight calculation suggested by this site, I burned about 31,658 calories of food by biking this year. That’s about 1,266 medium-sized carrots, or 220 beers. And, according to this site, that is approximately the same number of calories that are in a gallon of gasoline, so I bought 152 times as much calories of gas to drive my 5,056 miles as I did food energy to bike 837 miles. That makes biking a heck of a lot more efficient! My driving calories could have gotten me about 125,000 miles on a bicycle.
I’d like to do a cost analysis, too, but I’m behind on updating Quicken. Maybe later.
October 10, 2010 at 6:29 pm
You are the only person I know who would write a post like this! (Must be due to all the data and statistics processing you’ve been doing in school all these years?)
October 11, 2010 at 5:21 pm
You are wasting valuable time calculating such nonsense. I am personally tired of sharing the road with bicycles. You belong in parks and on sidewalks and not on roads. period.
Cheers,
Dan
October 11, 2010 at 8:51 pm
Dear Dan,
You are so right. I often have the same thought. It sucks how sharing the road with bicycles makes it so much harder to safely text while driving. Motorcycles are not much better, in my book. Small cars, too. At least they can keep up with traffic, but they’re always zipping around underfoot. Public nuisance.
Best,
Nathen