Commuting

So I was thinking about this coming month where I'll be commuting a lot, putting on some serious mileage, and hopefully saving gas.  I always wanted to commute to work more on my bike to save on gas and emissions and endurance mileage training is a great time for it!  I found myself wondering how much I've commuted to work thus far this year and how much (in theory) it's saved us.

I have three main routes:  round trip to work, round trip to church, and church/work/home.  I went back through Strava to count up my commutes (I also have some other extraneous rides I counted for this that saved on driving too).

I put together two levels of cost.  I used the federal cost-per-mile cost and also a cost calculated from http://commutesolutions.org/external/calc.html.  I don't know how accurate the latter is, but their numbers are much higher and make our savings seem that much higher.

I also tried to calculate the emissions per mile for my car and come up with an estimation on those savings as well.  I used http://www.nativeenergy.com/travel-carbon-calculator.html to come up with an amount of emissions per mile.

The Results:

• I saved 967.1 miles in my car by biking so far this year.
• According to the Federal cost per mile, I saved $531.90.
• According to the other estimate, I saved $1344.27.
• I prevented 0.744 tons of emissions from my car.

That's pretty awesome!  I'll try to keep my spreadsheet updated and report back at the end of the year.  In the meantime, check here to see my calculations.

Tom