Winter Walking and Cycling

[danbrotherston]

Indeed! Without in any way suggesting that bicycles are for lower-income people, consider that somebody with a very limited budget for vehicle purchases could, for the same money, buy either a real pile of junk car, or a top-notch bicycle. It makes more sense to see a poor person with a fancy carbon fibre bicycle than a poor person driving a car.

The London Bicycle Cafe has an interesting blog unpacking cost comparison for a car or fairly high end cargo bike.

There is also a general assumption that bikes are cannot be financed, but more often now dealers are partnering with groups who will to reduce that upfront cash. Whether people buy within their means when financing for cars or bikes is another story, but I do think that its possible to make even a relatively expensive pedelec comparable to the annual cost of even a lower value, used car (with much less repair cost risk to boot).

Before you even drive a car, you're into at least 1000 dollars in insurance. Add in another 500 in repairs and at minimum 500 in gas for only a small amount of driving, and you're hitting 2k per year before you've even paid for a car. If you buy a very cheap 5k used car and it lasts 5 years, you've got a good deal, so that's another 1k per year. So absolute minimum cost for a car is 3k/year (and we all know typical cost--not maximum, just average cost--is 10k per year) so yeah, I think you'd find it very difficult to buy a bike that's more expensive in annualized operating cost than even the least expensive car you can possibly own.

And yeah, I'm sure someone has some example of a 18 year old Toyota they got from some grandma who never drove it, which they then proceeded to never drive for another 10 years, and thus spent less than 3k per year on it...so like...sure, if you don't actually want to drive your car, you can spend less on it...why do you own a car again?