Calculating the Cost of Car Ownership

Every couple of months when I fill my car with gas I’m reminded how much money I save by riding my bicycles around town instead of driving my car. While it’s nice to save money on gas, what I appreciate more is not having to take my car in for service so often. Last week my car hit the 5,000 mile mark since its last oil change, so I took it in for service for the first time in years. Two years to be exact.

I hate taking my car in for service because they always recommend fixing something beyond the simple oil change or rotating tires. My 45,000 mile intermediate service only cost $233, but a leaking battery, worn front brakes and a little grease around CV boots brought the estimate up to $843. Ouch.

If I were driving the typical 15,000 miles a year, I’d be doing this intermediate service annually. Just one of the factors that makes car ownership so expensive. According to a calculator from Edmunds owning a Subaru Outback like mine in my area costs $50,000 to operate for five years after adding maintenance, repairs, insurance, financing and gas costs to the cost of the vehicle. That’s $10,000 per year. Double ouch.

Suddenly the $200 I spent last week on a pro tune-up, new brake pads and chain for Zella, my errand bike, seems really cheap. I don’t know her mileage, but I’ve had her almost 20 years and this is her first service beyond her replacing her tires and brake pads at the 10 year mark. Bikes are simpler than cars, that’s for sure.

The good news is that at my current rate of 1200 miles per year (what typical drivers do in a month, incidentally) I won’t hit the 60,000 mile major service for over 10 years. Now that makes me smile.

Do you track how much you spend on your car each year? What do you think costs the most: insurance, gas or maintenance and repairs? (Check out Edmunds calculator for your car to see what they estimate)

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I Ride My Bike Because My City Believes in Bikes

I googled my name today. For professional reasons, of course. On Monday, my company was acquired by a company with a different market strategy. So I’ll probably be looking for a new job soon, and I was wondering what a prospective employer might uncover in an internet search for my name. The good news is that (a) I am mayor of my own name, with 7 of the top 10 search results referring to me and (b) the results make me look like more of an industry expert than I truly am.

Just for fun I also searched for my name + bike, which led to some old race results, a video from Monitor Pass that I took from the back of a Goldwing motorcycle, and blog posts about the Low-Key Hill Climb that I coordinated in October. Then there was a “Share My Story” that I had submitted to the People for Bikes web site last July, something I had forgotten about. It even had a photo.

The story I submitted was more or less a letter I had sent to my congressional members when funding for bike infrastructure, and in particular, bike paths was are risk of being cut. It sums up why I ride rather than drive around town these days:

My Bike Makes My Neighborhood “Walkable”
I live in Mountain View, California, in the heart of suburban Silicon Valley. My neighborhood was built during the 1950s and 1960s, when cars were assumed to be the only means of transportation.

• I live five miles from my workplace, my doctor, my dentist, and a top-tier shopping mall.
• I live two miles from my pharmacy, the hardware store, the garden center, and a movie theater.
• I live one mile from the library, the post office, trendy restaurants, and a weekend farmers market.
• I live 1/2 mile from the grocery store.

When I moved here 25 years ago, I drove my car to all these places. But because my city invested in bicycle infrastructure, I now ride my bicycle instead.

Each year, my city has used a small fraction of their transportation dollars to build bike lanes, to adjust traffic signal sensors for bikes, to install bike racks, and calm traffic in my neighborhood. My city has also built a 5 mile “recreation” trail that doubles as a car-free route for children attending four elementary schools, and as an alternative to a bumper-to-bumper freeway commute for employees at companies like Google and Microsoft.

Because my city and its neighbors believed in bicycles as transportation, I save money on gas, reduce wear-and-tear on my car, and get exercise everyday. If more people used bikes instead of cars for their daily errands, our air would be cleaner, our neighborhoods quieter, and our businesses could use their valuable real estate for creating or selling products or services instead of housing parked cars.

Surveys show that people would ride bicycles more if our streets were made safer for bicycles. I know it made a difference for me.

The transportation bill managed to get out of congress with bike funding intact. Whew! But I know that bicycle and pedestrian programs are often the first parts cut. The reason? Many lawmakers and their constituents have never lived somewhere where bicycling was an easy, safe, pleasant alternative to driving a car. So sad.

What could your town or city could do to be more bike-friendly? Have you told your elected officials?

 

Blazing Trails at Water Dog

It was a sunny, crisp late fall California morning, the kind that promises to warm up quickly. So Jill, Cindy and I were itching to hit the trails with their post-rain tackiness. But this time, instead of grabbing our bikes we grabbed McClouds, Pulaskis and other trail building tools and got to work. ‘Cause Mother Nature may have created the forests and grasslands, but she doesn’t build the trails we ride, run and walk on. Volunteers do.

Our destination: Water Dog Lake Park in Belmont. Water Dog offers a rare taste of wilderness in the middle of the urban Bay Area: its canyons are deep, its bay-facing vistas expansive, and its streams largely untouched. How wild is it? Well, mountain lion sightings are not unusual.

Water Dog is also rare in that its trails not only welcome mountain bikers, its trails were largely built by mountain bikers. The singletrack designed by John Finch, Berry Stevens, Patty Ciesla and others is often technical, with ladder bridges and narrow boards allowing the trail to hug the canyon’s steep slopes. Water Dog delights thrill seekers, but has a reputation of leaving less skilled riders battered and bruised. More than one of my friends has been badly bitten by the ‘dog.

But on Saturday, my friends and I came out to Water Dog to build an easy-rated trail around the lake and tame the beast just a little. Led by Kevin Sullivan, a Belmont Parks & Recreation Commissioner and fellow mountain biker, we joined a team of other volunteers working on the new-and-improved Lake Trail. Volunteers have been working on this trail since before 2008, when I first joined a trailbuilding crew and helped pry out a small boulder.

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After a few hours of scraping hillsides, lifting lumber, digging foundations and drilling boards, we reaped the sweet rewards with a spin around the park. I strapped on the GoPro to capture the dizzying descent down the 17 well-banked switchbacks on the Finch Trail. Thank you, John, Berry, Patty and Kevin. It was totally awesome and only a little gnarly.

If you were building a mountain bike (or walking) trail, what would you want it to be like?

 

High Viz: Smart Style or What Not to Wear?

Nothing screams “Look at me” like high visibility jackets and vests, which come in oh-so-fashionable colors like fluorescent yellow and bright orange. The resulting look is often so ugly that many wouldn’t want to be caught dead on the side of the road in it, much less seen riding around town in it.

Before anyone jumps to defend their favorite jacket, I believe wearing high viz is smart for many situations, such as riding along high speed highways or in foggy weather. I have a high viz jacket I wear sometimes, like on this weekend trip my friend Deanna and I took to San Francisco back in 2005. It made me feel a lot safer, especially on that often foggy stretch of Skyline Boulevard where it crosses Hwy 1 in Daly City.

My problem with high viz clothing is the expectation that it’s essential gear for all riders. Or in the case of London, for pretty much anyone on the street. The hot fashion trend on the streets of London we saw on our recent trip was high viz, and not just for cyclists and road crews. We saw police, sanitation workers, delivery van drivers, schoolchildren on field trips and even horses flashing their high viz outfits in London.

London stood in sharp contrast with Paris and Amsterdam, where I can’t recall seeing anyone wearing high viz, not even cyclists or police directing traffic. In Paris, you can find police on bikes, on skates, even on Segways–none wearing high viz. (Just kidding about the Segways)

To me, widespread promotion of high viz clothing reinforces the belief that streets are inherently dangerous places for everyone not protected by a large metal box, and that it’s the duty of vulnerable street users to SHOUT OUT their presence. Otherwise, shame on them for not taking a necessary precaution.

Instead, it should be the duty of the drivers of motor vehicles to slow down, pay attention, and not bully cyclists and pedestrians on the street. It’s no surprise to me that the city where I felt most threatened by cars both on foot and on the bike is the one where high viz clothing is most popular. And that city wasn’t Paris.

Note: Photos below were liberally taken from various internet sources.

In London, even horses wear high viz.

Not just cops, but their motorcycles too.

In Spain, prostitutes walk the streets in high viz boleros.

In Paris, gendarmes ride bikes without high viz uniforms.

And skate without high viz uniforms.

Chinese police on Segways don’t need high viz. They have machine guns.

Do you have a high viz vest or jacket? If so, when do you wear it?
If someone suggested that you wear a high viz vest to walk the streets of your city, what would you think?

 

Dress for Success on the Bicycle

There’s a new CEO in town and I had a private meeting scheduled with him today. A single hour to dazzle him with deep insights, brilliant program ideas and report my team’s amazing results. So, what to wear? And which bike to ride?

Well, if I’d listened to the recent “sometimes you just need a car” ads from the Zipcar car sharing service, I would have driven in to work. After all, in today’s job market you can’t risk not impressing the new CEO. And how could anyone possibly suit up and carry a laptop on a bike?

Instead of getting indignant at Zipcar’s limited view of the bicycle’s utility, I took it as a challenge. I’ve already ridden my bike in professional dress to a meeting at our PR firm and to a pub for a beer after work with an alliance partner. But a suit with a narrow skirt? That’s the real challenge, not the heels and the laptop.

So I dug through my closet for a narrow skirt that had a chance of being rideable and found this one with a cute border of pleats along the back hem.

Then I hopped on Juliett, my Dutch bike, and gave it a test spin around the cul-de-sac. Success! Between Juliett’s step through frame and upright position, and those cute little pleats, I pedaled to work feeling confident, successful and ready to impress the new CEO.

As I strapped my ordinary laptop messenger bag onto Juliett, though, I decided we need a more stylish bag, like these from Dutch company FastRider.

Which one do you think is stylish enough for the ever fashionable Juliett? Tell me quick, cause it may take a while to track down where I can buy it.

 

Whisked Away by a Knight on a White Bike

I’m girl enough to have grown up with fantasies of the knight in shining armor whisking me away on his white horse. And I’m old enough to have watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in reruns on cable. Do you remember that movie, with its sweet scene where Paul Newman whisks Katharine Ross away on his bicycle to BJ Thomas’ “Rain Drops Keep Falling on My Head”? Talk about making a young girl swoon.

Which is one reason it disturbed me (and plenty others) to read about General Motors’s latest ad promoting car sales to college students. The message: guys on bikes are losers who will never get the hot chicks.

Boy, did this ad create a stir. By the time I write this, the bike blogosphere is fully aflame. Some bloggers protested that guys who ride bikes have fabulous bodies that make them super SEXY, others complained about GM encouraging young adults saddled with school loans to take on additional car loans they can ill afford. GM desperately backpedaled and discontinued the ads. A sure sign that bike culture is gaining momentum.

But as a woman who fell in love with her bike as a girl, then fell in love with a man on a bike as an adult, the ad seemed like a throwback to values from an era between Butch Cassidy and today.

I met my husband through bicycling, and fell in love with him not because he had a hot bod or because he was outsprinting the pack or even because he was saving the planet. I fell in love with him in part because he was a gentleman on the bicycle. When I met him I was training for my first triathlon and hadn’t tackled any of the backroads climbs that are expected in our area. So when he asked me out for a first date, a ride that included climbing Old La Honda, I said yes with excitement, but was instantly nervous.

Old La Honda Road is 3.3 miles long and climbs over 1300 feet. I had only done it once before on a group ride, where I quickly learned that climbing is not my strong point. My big question: should I climb hard on the date so as not to embarrass myself, or should I keep my pace at a level where he wouldn’t have to yell over my heavy breathing?

I chose the latter, and I swear he had to track stand on a couple of steep switchbacks since his lowest gear was a 39×26. But he stayed with me, chatting away, even when hardcore riders with training goals and big egos whizzed by us. Now that’s sexy. And that’s why there was a second, third and fourth date, why I married him and why we still ride together.

I think GM could learn a thing or two watching reruns on cable of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. After all, Katharine Ross hopped out of bed with Robert Redford to ride off with Paul Newman.

It must have been the bike.

What do you find sexiest about a guy (or a girl) on a bike?

[if you don't have time to watch the whole video, the 45 seconds from 4:15 to the end says it all]

 

Jerry, Jerry, Why Have You Forsaken Me?

How could you veto SB 910, the safe bicycle passing bill? The bill simply clarified to drivers how to pass safely with three clear instructions:

(1) Leave a buffer of three or more feet between your vehicle and the bike you’re passing.
(2) If the road has a double yellow center line, you can cross the center line to pass, provided there’s not oncoming traffic or other dangers.
(3) If you’re driving slower than 15 mph, you can pass closer than three feet.

What’s so wrong with this? It’s what 95% of drivers–the safe ones–have been doing forever. Even when it meant breaking the law, which currently doesn’t allow crossing the double yellow line, not even on rural two lane roads without turnouts.

Requiring a three foot buffer has been legislated in 20 other states, including my home state of Louisiana, with no ill effects reported. Sometimes illegal three foot passing is the only violation they can pin on drivers who hit cyclists from behind, like Jan Morgan, a severely injured triathlete in Mississippi. But that’s another sad story.

For me, what was worse than the veto was Governor Brown’s illogical reasoning: that drivers who slow down and wait until they can safely pass would cause rear end collisions. What?! Drivers slow down on roads all the time to maintain safety: for yellow lights, for cars slowing to turn right, for garbage trucks and postal vans. In fact, cars turning left often stop–in the left lane for christsakes–until the opposite traffic is clear, forcing all vehicles behind them to STOP, not just slow down.

I think the real reason he vetoed the bill was in deference to the California Highway Patrol, which opposed the bill, even though the bill included their recommended provision to allow crossing the double yellow center line. Maybe I should have said “CHP, CHP, why have you forsaken me?”

Why would a government agency dedicated to ensuring public safety on the roadways not be interested in ensuring safety for ALL roadway users? The only answer I can come up with is that like many drivers, the CHP considers cyclists on the roadway a nuisance and they secretly wish we would all go away. Maybe they’re hoping the unsafe drivers who buzz by us will scare us off the road, forever.

Someone please tell me this isn’t so, ’cause I’m losing faith.

 

My Office’s Very Own Bike to Work Day

The email came in Thursday from Jon the CFO: “OK, folks, given the hot weather of late and the reality that we might be enjoying the last days of summer weather, I am declaring that tomorrow anyone who wants to wear shorts to work can do so! And those of you who want to ride their bikes to work should do so. Janet has been trying to get me to ride to work for a long time now and I’ve never done so. But tomorrow is the day – I am going to put on a pair of shorts in the morning and bike to the office. So if you don’t want to see me in shorts, you might want to quickly arrange a vacation day tomorrow!”

What a surprise! After Jon told me how he used to ride his bike all over Manhattan as a teen, I had been gently nudging him to ride his bike to work. He lives less than two miles from the office, but he had the usual concerns: what to wear, scheduling around offsite meetings, etc. But Friday was was the day. He rode to work on the same 1979 Raleigh 10 speed from his high school days on the Upper East Side, wearing the same big smile I’m sure he wore as a teenager who had the freedom to roam the whole island.

Jon isn’t the only person I’ve gently nudged toward biking to work. There’s Stephane, who recently joined us from our Paris office. He and his wife found a place to live near downtown Palo Alto, less than three miles from our office. Being good California suburbanites, they bought a small SUV which they share. They also share a bike, which Stephane rides to work most days and his wife uses for errands on other days.

Melissa usually rides her motor scooter to the office from her home three miles away, so she’s got an easy commute. She surprised me one day by telling me she wanted to ride her bicycle to work and where did I suggest she park it. I didn’t realize that Melissa used to teach English in Japan, where she rode a bicycle as daily transportation. Now she splits her time riding in to work between her scooter and her bike.

Given there are only 14 people working in our small office, I’m really impressed that we have four people who have turned in their car commute for a bike commute at least some of the time. We also have two guys who ride in on motorcycles daily, which puts us at close to 50% of our workforce using lower impact transportation. Pretty impressive considering our office is located in a suburban office park, not a downtown type location. And it definitely puts a smile on my face.

For those who regularly bike commute to work: has riding to work had an influence on your co-workers’ transportation choice? For those who don’t: does having co-workers bike commuting to the office make you want to ride in too?

 

Cycling from Eight to Eighty

Have you heard slogan “from eight to eighty” from the San Francisco Bicycle Coalition? Their mission is to build safe, comfortable, continuous bikeways, fit for cyclists of all ages. I’m sure many people find the idea of 80 year olds riding bikes far fetched, but I don’t have to look any farther than my very own family.

Meet Mom and Dad. They’re 80, and they’re still pedaling strong. It was hard to get ahead of them to take these photos on our vacation in Florida this summer. I had to ask Dad to slow down so I could snap the photo.

Both have been riding since their childhood in the 1930′s in small town Louisiana. Dad and his brother were paperboys, delivering the nightly news to everyone in town. During WWII, they became experts at bike repair when parts were scarce and even a simple innertube impossible to buy. Mom has never been an athlete. She kept score rather than play on her high school’s girls basketball team. With only 13 in their graduating class, I’m surprised they didn’t need her to field a team.

Growing up, bicycling around the neighborhood was an all-family activity, which Mom and Dad continued after we all moved out. Dad still zips around pushing a big gear while Mom rolls along at her own pace. Still, Mom managed to put 3500 miles on her bike in her mid-70s, averaging 13 miles a week on her four mile loop.

Aren’t they cute? In Florida I even convinced them to let me take their bike portraits. Mom was more than willing to take a glamour shot in her sundress and thong heels. And it only seemed fitting that I catch Dad on the way to the courts, because tennis, not bicycling is his real passion.

I’m really proud of my parents and how they’ve taken care of themselves. They’re cute together, aren’t they?

Can you imagine riding when you’re 80? What about 90 or even 100?

 

Where Buena Vista Doesn’t Mean Good View

A few weeks ago I wrote a letter complaining about “Keep Right” signs on downhill Page Mill Road near Moody Road. I had assumed the signs were prompted by drivers who wanted cyclists to “stay in their place” so they could pass more quickly, without regard for cyclist safety. The County Traffic Engineer responded that the signs were installed because residents on Buena Vista Drive complained they couldn’t see cyclists descending Page Mill when they turn left onto Buena Vista. Somehow, they believe that cyclists who keep right are more visible.

But the signs may come down soon, and not because cyclists like me complained. In their place, the residents now want a stop sign installed on Page Mill for the downhill travel lane only! Does this sound like a good idea to you? Not me. So I wrote back saying I thought a downhill only stop sign would be confusing and merely shifts the burden of safely yielding the right of way from the uphill traffic to the downhill traffic.

Today, I went up Page Mill to check the intersection out again. I took this series of photos as I walked up Page Mill Road toward the Buena Vista and Moody Rd intersections. The photos were taken from the vantage point of a car driver, at approximately 20 feet intervals.

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My take: Downhill traffic is visible to uphill traffic at the Buena Vista intersection if the uphill traffic slows to nearly a stop before turning, something I guess the residents of the eight homes on Buena Vista don’t want to do. After all, it’s far easier for them if all other traffic stops just for them. If they want a stop sign, I think it should be four-way stop, like the traffic consultants recommended in their report.

What do you think? Does a downhill-only stop sign make sense? What about a four-way stop?

If you care about this issue, let the county supervisors know about it! You can attend the meeting on Tuesday, September 27 or write a letter. Details on how are courtesy of the Silicon Valley Bicycle Coalition.

Speaking of passing without regard for safety, while I was taking photos I also videotaped a driver passing a cyclist on this blind turn. What was the driver thinking? It’s a good thing that the white SUV that appears around 0:12 wasn’t there 10 seconds earlier!