I got in the habit of riding my bike to work every day while visiting my mum up in the Coromandel and I’m finding it a rather hard habit to shake. The problem is, now my work is 25 km away instead of 5 km away. Could an ebike help with this situation?
Before I do anything, I like to do the maths on it. Sometimes, I do the thing first, and then the maths on it afterwards. That is called Richard working in reverse. This time, it’s just plain old Richard, and I’m doing the math before I plop down several thousand on an ebike.
The main benefit to ebikes is their speed. They are much faster than normal bikes and give you the speed and acceleration of a competitive cyclist with virtually zero effort.
An ebike travelling at 32kph should reach work in around 48 minutes. This is just 24 minutes longer than the usual drive will take me. Best of all, it avoids most traffic and parking complications.
To do it on a normal bike would, according to Google Maps, take me 1 hour and 16 minutes. A bit too long for me, considering I have to go there and back again each day. I mean, I’m all for saving the environment but this is ridiculous.
Operating an ebike sits right in my sweet spot. It basically means that work being 25 km away is the perfect range. It saves my pocket and saves my conscience simultaneously – an experience that I would characterise as as close to an orgasm as I have experienced recently.
How much do I save if I do this every work day of the year?
My car uses one litre roughly every 18 km. Fuel prices around here fluctuate depending on where you get your petrol, but are generally around $2 per litre. So a one way trip would save me $2.78 or $5.56 return per day. Assume 250 days working per year and you have a cool saving of $1,390 per year.
But then there’s all the ancillary driving – you know, driving 3 km to go to the supermarket, driving 3 km to go to the video store, 1.5 km to go to the pool. An ebike could mop up all of that stuff as well. While it’s difficult to say exactly how much of that sort of driving I do each week, I wouldn’t be surprised if it works out to around 40 km in total. That’s an additional saving of $4.44 per week or around $231 per year.
Does it tie in with solar?
Part of what got me thinking of ebikes to begin with was more additional uses for solar power generated by our panels. We currently have a surplus solar power situation, and while it’s not getting out of hand, we might as well use it for something.
But I have to say that ebikes aren’t especially useful for solar power, given that they’re so darn cheap to run to begin with. A standard ebike battery holds a maximum charge of around 360 W. That’s practically nothing, and using solar to charge it would only save me 9c per day or $22.50 per year. Still, it all adds up, I guess.
What’s the ROI?
So, from a pure cost perspective, assuming I use it every day of the year, plus use it for ancillary travel, it would save me $1621. If I budget $4200 for a high quality ebike then it works out to 39% return on investment annually.
Other Hidden Benefits
It also would save me the cost of a gym membership, effectively, because I’m getting in 1.5 hours additional exercise per day. (Yes, it might not be overly demanding exercise, but it’s still exercise.) I use the pool and gym intermittently, costing around $20 per week. That would save an extra $1,040, bringing the total amount saved to $2,661 per annum.
The Time Cost
The biggest problem is the time cost. And this could affect the return on investment, depending on how I value my time. Ordinarily, I would value my time at around $50 per hour, and there is no doubt that the extra transit time would cost me a net of at least 45 minutes’ extra travel time per day. The cost, if I were to calculate it this way, would be $37.50 per day, or $9,375 per year, with a resulting net cost of $6,714 or -160% return on investment per year.
But there is a problem in looking at things this way. At the same time as the ebike steals time, it also creates time, by reducing the amount of time that I need to spend at the gym. So while I might spend an extra three and three quarter hours per week transiting to work (0.75 hours x 5), I would actually save 4.5 hours per week, assuming that I went to the gym three times a week, and that each occasion took one hour with 15 minutes’ travel each way. This would be a net benefit of 0.75 hours per week, at an additional value of $37.50 per week, or $1950 per year.
This would bring the savings up to $4611 or 110% return on investment per year. If these assumptions are right then the ebike would literally pay for itself within one year.
Note that I haven’t even factored in the cost of parking because I don’t pay for parking currently, being in Kapiti.
Conclusion
So, in summary, I’m heavily in favour of it. It’s very rare to find an opportunity that yields more than 100% return on investment in the first year and also saves the environment from approximately 6kg of newly emitted CO2 per day. Not to mention that with the rising cost of petrol, it will likely save me far more money than that over the long run.
But there’s still an extra step I ought to take – that of travelling the full distance to work to find out whether ‘the coast is clear’ so to speak – and to make sure that the travel is a properly viable option.
