Does Cycling To Work Save You Money?

[hatler]

Public transport commute = £11/day.
Driving not an option.
I've paid for my bike and all associated maintenance and parts many many times over.

 

[simongt]

It went out of date in 2016.

'Best before' & 'Use by' dates are a massive con on a naive public. Back 'in't day when I were lad' there wasn't any such thing. If it looked okay, smelt okay and tasted okay, you ate it - ! Many's the occasion we've eaten 'out of date' food to no ill effects and we're still alive to tell the tale - ! The amount of perfectly consumable food that is dumped by either the retailer or the customer because it's 'out of date' is frightening.
Have I hit on a sensitive point here I wonder - ?

 

[byegad]

There are far more costs to running a car than just the fuel alone, the average in the UK being around 40 per mile.

When we had two cars, Lady byegad's was swapped for a new one every 3 yrs. Mine simply got older, so we used hers for holidays and longer runs and mine around the doors. I was cycling 4-5000 miles a year, my car did less than 3000. But to simply tax, insure, MOT and service my car was £800/annum without it turning a wheel. That would buy a basic commuter bike with change to spare. In the end I gave up on my car and sold it.

 

[Drago]

Not that I have need to commute any more, but heres howmit would work out for me...

Road tax - 30 sheets a month.

Servicing - 400 odd quid a year, so about 33 a month.

Fuel - just to my old workplace and back, no other journeys, would be about £100 a month.

Sundry motoring expenses averaged out over a year that wouldnt be covered by servicinf, such as tyres, brakes, unforseen running repairs etc - 50 notes.

Thats £213 a month. Averaging out the cost of bikes, tyres, frivolous accessories and toys, I still wouldn't habe got to 50 quid a month while i was cycling, so the savings would have been significant for me. Add in that our local town may soon be getting a workplace parking tax, then the savings would be even greater.

Add in the value of the time saved not being stuck in traffic, caluculated at off duty rates of Tx1.5, and it becomes a massive win for the bike, in my case at least.

 

[screenman]

Not that I have need to commute any more, but heres howmit would work out for me...

Road tax - 30 sheets a month.

Servicing - 400 odd quid a year, so about 33 a month.

Fuel - just to my old workplace and back, no other journeys, would be about £100 a month.

Sundry motoring expenses averaged out over a year that wouldnt be covered by servicinf, such as tyres, brakes, unforseen running repairs etc - 50 notes.

Thats £213 a month. Averaging out the cost of bikes, tyres, frivolous accessories and toys, I still wouldn't habe got to 50 quid a month while i was cycling, so the savings would have been significant for me. Add in that our local town may soon be getting a workplace parking tax, then the savings would be even greater.

Add in the value of the time saved not being stuck in traffic, caluculated at off duty rates of Tx1.5, and it becomes a massive win for the bike, in my case at least.

What would the Volvo be going down by, I am guessing my Octavia by about £50 a week, if I had paid retail for it then more like £65.

 

[Drago]

Indeedy. If id paid for the Volvo instead of being gifted it id have had to factor in depreciation and rapahments.

Imforgotmto add insurance, which would be a further 20 sheets a months.

 

[mjr]

The marginal cost of me driving ten miles rather than riding them is pretty low if I've already laid out fixed expenses like road tax, insurance etc. It's basically just the fuel and a tiny bit of wear & tear.

Insurance varies with mileage, unless you pick a really crap deal. It is not a fixed cost. In the strictest sense, nor is vehicle tax because it varies with emissions. It is a motoring lobby lie that those are fixed costs and I am surprised to read it from @SkipdiverJohn who I thought was a clearer thinker than that!

And road tax doesn't exist!

 

[Twilkes]

5 years of train fares would have cost me around £5k.

Spent £1500 on bikes in that time, and probably £200 on tyres, £75 on tubes and patches, maybe £400 on clothes and kit/chains etc, £150 on lights, probably a few other bits and pieces too.

So £2-2.5k up. But I would likely have owned a lot of that stuff anyway, for weekend riding, so it's more like saving £4.5k.

And in my experience anyone who skives at home is equally as good at skiving in the office.

 

[Lovacott]

You need a fair bit of skill or luck to find, select and acquire a fine old bike at cut price.

A bloke at work was telling me today how his daughter has just bought a few months old Specialized Allez for half the current listed price of £799.

The original buyer bought it for his wife to encourage her to come out on local rides with him. She wanted to get used to the bike first so used it indoors on a fitness rig for about a week before throwing in the towel and sticking it on Ebay. My workmates daughter was the highest bidder at £200.

My workmates daughter, chuffed to bits with her buying skills, has since ridden the bike once (to the end of the road and back) before putting it in the shed next to the lawnmower.

Do I now swoop in and offer £200?

 

[Lovacott]

And road tax doesn't exist!

+1

Government spending is never paid for with taxes. It is paid for with "money" raised from bond issues and the bonds themselves are to be settled by some future generation.

Taxation is simply a demonstration by the government that they are making some kind of effort to recover some of that "debt" so that they can continue to borrow in the future.

 

[Twilkes]

+1

Government spending is never paid for with taxes. It is paid for with "money" raised from bond issues and the bonds themselves are to be settled by some future generation.

Taxation is simply a demonstration by the government that they are making some kind of effort to recover some of that "debt" so that they can continue to borrow in the future.

The stats I found showed that government spending was around £800bn while tax receipts were around £750bn, so over 93% funded by taxes (2017/18). Not really just 'some kind of effort'.

The post you were replying to was pointing out there is no road tax, just vehicle excise duty which goes into the general pot, not ring-fenced to pay for roads.

 

[Lovacott]

The stats I found showed that government spending was around £800bn while tax receipts were around £750bn, so over 93% funded by taxes (2017/18). Not really just 'some kind of effort'.

You only mention structural deficit and forget to mention all of the government spending which went before it which hasn't been covered and never could be covered.

 

[SkipdiverJohn]

Splitting hairs about the legal definition of road tax is a diversionary irrelevance. You tax a vehicle, you pay X amount a year. It's a fixed cost. If the car doesn't do one mile all year and is just parked on the street, you are still paying. Insurance is exactly the same. When you do a proposal form it will normally ask you how many miles you are likely to drive a year. The resulting premium will not be reduced if it turns out at the end of the year you did less miles than you estimated you might do. The premium was based on the info that you gave at the start of the year. The cost is fixed. My MOT test is the same price regardless of how many miles I do between tests too.
Most people are paying more in fixed motoring costs than they are in variable ones, hence the fact that it doesn't make much difference in the scheme of things to do a few extra miles. The regressive nature of VED actually encourages more car use, since you might as well "get your money's worth" out of it once you have paid for a year up front. A pure fuel duty system would reward restraint in car use, VED does the opposite. The problem then is if you scrap all VED, then the electric car drivers - who still cause the same amount of congestion and pollute remotely, get a free ride at the expense of everyone else.

 

[Archie_tect]

Skip's right... pay per mile with a variable rate according to the bhp of the vehicle, with an additional higher inner city congestion rate per mile as a further disincentive to unnecessary journeys.

 

[Tom B]

Skip's right... pay per mile with a variable rate according to the bhp of the vehicle, with an additional higher inner city congestion rate per mile as a further disincentive to unnecessary journeys.

Agreed, though not sure about the bhp aspect, I suppose you could use per kWh for electric cars.
Or a multiplier based on the weight of the vehicle or more problematically the new price of a vehicle. The weight would probably be fairer to give an incentive for manufacturers to build lighter less damaging vehicles.

The way in which people approach cars and car "ownership" is changing. People are becoming more used to leasing or at least never owning cars and paying a monthly fee as driven by the god awful value (imho) pcps. This will persist into electric vehicles and or electric vehicle battery packs. I suspect that these will start to come with price per mile components, already many deals have a price per mile over a certain amount.

Black box insurance has been around for a while now and now you have insurance you can buy for an annual fee + a price per mile. Intended for low milage users.

I think of we built the rules and regs around motor vehicles now we'd do thing differently. MoTs every 10k miles or 12 months, insurance per mile with cards/disks, "road tax" replaced by a per mile basis.

Motoring is a political hot potato, Brits are very attached to the motorcar and have a weird relationship with cars personifying them (I've washed and valeted my car to treat her somo she'llpass the MOT - mine gets that after the MOT donors not wasted if it gets scrapped. I have been known to present a car with a known fault to MOT to make sure there are no other faults and I'm not wasting money fixing the one I know about).

The very vocal influencial baby boomer generation and their immediate generational neighbours. They've been brought up with the car as a God given right, as an extension big their personality and taken for granted. I include my father in this who drives the 200yrds to my aunt's and half mile to the local shops despite being retired and by his own admission bored. He looks at a bus or a train with scorn despite having a brief flirtation his bus pass. No amount of explaining the train is faster, cheaper and gets you to city centre will alter his preoccupation and desire to fill the car with fuel, drive and pay (and moan about doing so) to park. He's an intelligent man, he must understand but he insists on taking the tin box.

Interestingly my mother doesn't drive she does walk to the shops, and to work but increasingly dad insists on driving her everywhere. She pulls her face at the prospect of public transport. We was staying in Penrith prior to lockdown 1 and I invited her up for a few days. This would have meant her getting on a train at Bolton Station and Getting off the same train an hour later in Penrith.
She point blank refused and wanted me to drive down to come and get her then drive back. She's tight as cramp but doesn't see the costs of driving. It's just a cost she thinks must be swallowed.

I doubt we'll ever get this generation out of their cars or away from their obsession or short minded relationship with the car. It seems these are the same people kicking up about the cyclelanes the council has proposed or installed locally.

I do see some change going on with younger generations being less reliant on the car and more willing to accept alternatives.