10 Reasons to Not Get a Cargo Bike

The extra exercise from cargo biking might cause you to drop a size, requiring you to get newer, better fitting clothing.

This is a real problem. I hate shopping. Hate it. So I have to eat vast quantities of food just to make sure I don’t have to get newer fitted clothing ever. Packing away so much delicious food means I’m depriving someone else of it, yes, so I follow it with milkshakes so I can live with myself.

I agree that a pet peeve I have with articles citing the savings of commuting by bike wildly understate the costs. I have to replace 4-6 items of clothing a year, for example, at an average cost per item of around $50. Tubes wear out or flat every 3 months or so on average, at $6 a pop. Good tools costs, and even then I won’t do some repairs myself. And then there’s the added beer consumption.

@peterw_diy 107110 wrote:

Your maintenance costs are $0.10/mile, so how does it cost you more than $3.00 for 25 miles?

Biking at a steady 15mph consumes energy at the rate of about 22 miles per whopper (with cheese). My commute is 30 miles (RT) by car (Corolla, avg 36mpg), and 43 miles by bike. The GPS estimates about 1800 Calories per commute. Even using the lower whopper estimate (1500 Calories), I’d have to be creative to compensate that energy deficit with $2 in food without suffering gastronomic distress (noooo, not a cup of canola oil!).

The IRS says it costs about 60 cents a mile to own and operate a car. The IRS is not in the business of giving money away, so I’ll accept that as an average value. (That said, there is a wide range depending on lots of variables).

Over the many years I have owned bikes, my experience is about 10-15 cents/mile, including the cost of the bike. I’m a bit of a cheapskate, so I know it can be a lot more.

For instance, a rider who spends $3000 on a cargo bike is going to have to ride it 30,000 miles before just the capital costs drop to 10 cents/mile–not including any maintenance along the way. There are lots and lots of riders out there who won’t ride 30,000 miles over their entire lives.

So 25 cents or more per mile for some bicyclists is not an unreasonable estimate, and I would guess that there are plenty for whom their full costs may very well exceed the costs of operating their cars.

Lesson?
You gotta ride your bike to make the numbers work.

Fuel – you mean if you didn’t bike you’d sit on your duff and not exercise some other way? If so, let’s factor in healthcare costs, OK?

@peterw_diy 107120 wrote:

Fuel – you mean if you didn’t bike you’d sit on your duff and not exercise some other way? If so, let’s factor in healthcare costs, OK?

Yes and ok.

Heart disease goes down, broken bones go up.

You all are entirely too disciplined in your diets. My bike commute barely offsets the vices of my caloric intake. I’m a sucker for an imperial IPA…

It’s hard to determine the actual costs for us. Because of the locations of home/work/kids’ school, I’d be crazy not to bike. If I drive, it’s probably 20 minutes each way, and I’d have to drive to school, drop the kids, drive home, and then begin my commute to work. If I drove the whole way it’s $20/day for parking. We can take Metro, but it’s a half mile walk, three stops, then a mile walk. The bus isn’t terrible but it’s a transfer plus a five block walk. Those of you with children 6 and under can understand the drawbacks of two rush hour buses plus a walk.

If I bike, it’s an extra 1.5 miles added to my commute. I have good bike parking at work. Yes, we spent $2000+ on the cargo bike, plus a non-trivial amount on winter/rain clothes for everyone. And hauling that much weight all the time is tough on any bike, so maintenance is not trivial, either. But we paid off my car in 2011. If we drove a lot, we would have replaced it by now, but it’s a 2006 and hasn’t quite broken 70,000 miles. We put 5500 miles on it in 2014.

The hardest to quantify is my mental well-being. I’m in such a better mood when I bike. Even on the crappy days.

Anyway, I don’t really have a point here except that it’s extremely difficult to quantify the exact difference between using the cargo bike and using the car or anything else. But my Xtracycle makes me happy, so I don’t really care.

@GB 107124 wrote:

Yes and ok.

Heart disease goes down, broken bones go up.

My rate of broken bones is about one every 15 years. If that’s the cost of avoiding cardiac failure, it’s a bargain.