I have reached $100 out of $630. As a reminder, I am only counting trips for shopping or running errands. Here is an interim summary:
- The goal started 100 days ago
- So far, I’ve managed to offset $100
- On average, I “get back” $1 a day
This means that at this pace, it will take about 630 days for the bike to pay for itself. For instance, if I were riding my bike to work, it would obviously pay off much faster. Or consider another example: if the store were far from home and I had to cycle there every single time—the bike would also pay for itself much faster in that case. But at this lazy pace, the payoff is slow.
That said, calculating the actual savings isn’t simple. The only “direct” benefit comes when I use my bike instead of taking the tram. But what happens when I ride to a distant store where the tram doesn’t run at all? If I hadn’t had a bike, I would have saved even more: I wouldn’t have gone there in the first place, and I wouldn’t have bought all that junk at the store 😤 It’s complicated.