So this analysis is strictly between bike ownership and owning a second car, so in that way I think it is very fair and even handed.

“And I just thought of this, can you put a value on the exercise that bike commuting provides if you wouldn’t have exercised without it?”
That’s personal, as it depends on how much you value exercise. Is it something you feel you should do but never get around to? Would those 2h of biking be ideal or overkill? (If ideal, that’d zero net time costs for a bike, versus 1h for a car.) Or do you consider exercise to be a total waste of time? Torture maybe? Does that answer your question?

I think I understood your point. It is like saying that the free time of riding my bike each day is really only 50% as good as completely free time that I would have at home if I drove.

Thinking about this idea just I had this thought, “How would you calculate the value of those two hours?” My thinking right now is that you would need to count it as essentially money neutral (neither counting as a credit or a cost). This is because for ever minute that you would spend bike commuting you are only getting 50% of “free time” from it – so half of it counts as a cost and the other half counts as a credit. But I may not be thinking all that through entirely and its just my off the cuff thought about it.

And I just thought of this, can you put a value on the exercise that bike commuting provides if you wouldn’t have exercised without it? So if I didn’t exercise except if I commute by bike does that someone add even more value to the credit side of the bike commuting equation? I hadn’t thought of that before.

Anyway, thanks for stopping by again and for your thoughtful comment. It sure is fun to think deeply!

Just like you, I ultimately want to weigh biking time against car commuting costs, so yes I’ll need to put a $$ value on that biking time too.

What I suggested above, is to first convert biking time to REAL leisure time equivalent hours, then multiply by $16 (the value of 1h of REAL leisure time), and consider the result a credit* that can be subtracted from the total biking time cost. For instance, if biking takes up 2h/day, and I judge I get “1h leisure time” of value out of it, then I can conclude that biking time costs me net $16.

* this credit is the very same thing as your biking “excercise credit”, though you might end up with a different value (depending on how good your estimates in both cases are).

Hope this cleared it up. Success with the blog!

Thanks for the thoughtful comment! I think I definitely see where you are coming from in comparing “completely free time” with the time that your commute forces you to spend doing an activity, and I think you are definitely on to something. You essentially add a penalty to credits when they are not completely equal with your “completely free time” – I think that this makes a lot of sense.

Concerning how to keep track of all this, I prefer to mark things in terms of dollars because that means I can compare the time I spend commuting one way to other aspects of other commutes. Time costs becomes comparable to the cost of maintenance, gas, insurance, bus fare, and all the other financial considerations of my commute. For example, the cost of time to bike commute is roughly equivalent to the money spent on gas, insurance, maintenance, and the time commuting by car. This comparison is important to me.

But this does leave my way of looking at it subject to objections about how I value time. But by looking just at the amount of time I spend doing something would be more like comparing apples to apples and would avoid this objection. So I will definitely need to think about this some more.

Thanks again.

Over from FMF’s Carnival. Great post! Trickiest part is to account for differences in quality between time spent on bus, bike, or at home. My approach is expressing bus time in leisure time equivalent hours. In other words: how much leisure time would I trade my bus time for?

1h on the bus may be worth, for instance:
- 1h of completely free leisure time, if an activity I’d do anyway at home can just as well be done on the bus
- 30 min, if my productivity is lower on the bus, or it isn’t but I don’t like the noise, or I can’t engage in my favorite activity…
- 0 min (or even less), if my time on the bus is a complete waste (or I’d even pay to make time go faster)

It’s an intuitive way to compare car/bus/bike, and you could, if need be, convert hours of leisure time to dollars.

Hope you like it. Success with the blog!