Is riding a bike to work actually worth it?
For Let’s Bike Month (formerly Bike to Work Month), I test the value of my bike commute to see if it beats driving or transit
After three years of working remotely, I’ve gone back to the office, in-person, four days a week. This means one big change to my transportation patterns: I’m commuting again. As you may expect, I used to commute by bicycle between my home in Centretown and my office in Westboro, year-round. Now that I’m doing it again after so long, I want to know if it actually makes sense in terms of both time and money. I’d taken my enjoyable bike commute for granted before the pandemic, and now I’m looking for a clear answer: is cycling really the best mode of transportation for my commute?
This post is going to look only at my commute, which I do four days a week. I’ll compare the value of riding a bike to driving a car or taking a bus. My commute is meaningful for this type of analysis because it’s between 1 and 8 kilometres—the “ideal distance” for cycling, according to Ottawa’s new Transportation Master Plan. Under 8 km is about a 30-minute trip for an average cyclist, which is a practical commute length for most people and reasonably competitive against other modes. Using my own commute also adds some serious stakes: if it turns out that I’d be better off driving, then I’m fully prepared to ditch my three-speed. Maybe I’ll even start a driving newsletter.
I’ll start this analysis by looking at the monthly cost of driving, cycling, and taking transit. I’ll have to make some assumptions, and the final numbers will just be estimates, but I’ll show my work. Importantly, the assumptions I make will be based on my own preferences and circumstances. I’ll be conservative with my bike assumptions and generous to driving to counter any sense that I’m being biased towards cycling. Of course, in the real world I don’t commute the same way each day—last week during the heatwave, for example, I biked to the O-Train so I could spend less time outside. But in this simulation, every commute will purely be either bike, bus, or car.
The cost of transportation
Let’s start with cycling. I own a winter bike and a three-season bike. I bought both of these within the last five years for about $450 each, and I expect I’ll have to replace one within the next five years at double the price. That puts my capital budget at about $1,000 every five years, averaging out at $200 per year. I also spend about $150 on maintenance each year between tuneups and repairs, and spend another $150 on gear—a handlebar bag, a basket, a helmet, winter gloves, etc. That makes my total yearly spending on bike riding to be $500 per year, or $42 a month. Let’s round that up to $50 ($600 total), just to be generous.
Calculating transit cost is easy. A monthly pass is $125.50. That’s $1,506 per year.
Understanding driving cost is more complicated, and new to me because I’ve never owned a car. To start, I’ll have to buy a car. I’d want a compact and efficient car at a low price, preferably a hybrid (I can’t get an EV because my apartment doesn’t have the right hookups). I’ve driven a Prius C with my Communauto membership, and so I think I’d go with a used one of those. There’s a 2012 model available in Carp that would run me $14,500. On top of a $5,000 down payment (for this analysis I’ll spread out that capital cost at $1,000 a year over five years), my monthly financing would be $182.96 over 60 months. According to the CAA’s driving cost calculator, I should expect a yearly insurance cost of $1,436.19 ($119.68 a month) and yearly maintenance costs of $1,072.57 ($89.38 a month). My apartment building doesn’t have a parking space for me, and the street I live on doesn’t qualify me for an on-street permit, and so my most convenient option would be to feed the meter in the morning for an hour before work and two hours after—which would cost $10.50 a day or $168 for a typical month. Parking at my office would be $10 a day, or $160 a month. Finally, gas. I’m actually surprised at how cheap this is: with the Prius’s 3.85 L/100 km fuel efficiency, driving 256 kilometres a month for my commute would only cost a monthly average of $16.26 (assuming a gas price of $1.65/L). I’m not going to factor in depreciation, and I’ll ignore the one-time cost of vehicle registration ($32). Altogether, my upfront cost together with monthly expenses for owning and driving a car total up to $819.62—nearly $10,000 per year.
Obviously, there is a wide contrast between the yearly cost for each mode: $600 for cycling, $1,506 for transit, and $9,835.40 for driving.
The value of time
But that’s just pure cost. Now I need to look at the value of time spent commuting—and this is where driving has an advantage. My bike ride to the office is 30 minutes in the morning, but I usually take a leisurely route on the way home that ends up being 45 minutes. That’s 75 minutes a day, 300 minutes a week, and 1,200 minutes—20 hours!—a month. Driving is 15 minutes each direction, 30 minutes total a day. For this model, I’ll assume traffic won’t exist—not once ever—so I’d be behind the wheel only 8 hours a month. The bus would take me 40 minutes each way, including walking between stops and destinations and waiting for transfers, assuming the bus is never late (or doesn’t disappear). The LRT western extension will make this commute easier starting in 2026, but for now I’d be spending 80 minutes a day on the bus or 21.3 hours a month.
Time is money, and there are two methods to convert commuting duration into dollar figures for measuring value. The first is to look at the value of time saved (VOT). The way to figure this out is by asking how much someone would pay to save a given amount of transportation time. For example, if I was willing to pay $5 to save 10 minutes from my driving commute, my value of travel time would be $30/hour. This type of analysis is helpful when determining the cost of toll roads, which are intended provide the premium service of shorter and more reliable trips. But the value of travel time is subjective for each person, depending on the type of trip, the amount of money they have, the situation, the weather, the road conditions, the view, or even just the mood of the driver. Some days it’s nice to take the long way home, and so there is no value in time saved. Accounting for all those factors, the typical VOT can range from $5 to $30 per hour.1
The other way to translate time into money is by looking at the cost of time spent. This is calculated by looking at how that person is usually compensated for their time. In my case, the cost of each hour of transit time would be my hourly wage at work. I won’t reveal my current salary, but for this exercise let’s assume I have the median income for a person who live in my census tract, which would be $30/hour. But the time saved on a faster commute isn’t always spent working—I might have spent that extra time savouring the last sips of my coffee or writing this newsletter, things I do for free. Still, my time does have value. To split the difference between zero and the local median hourly wage, I’ll say each non-working hour of my time is worth Ontario’s minimum wage: $15.50. This number happens to fall in line with the average VOT, so make the calculations simple, I’ll use the method of costing the time spent using the $15.50 per hour rate.
But even factoring in travel time cost, cycling still comes out on top—and it’s not close. Riding a bike costs me $3,720 in time per year (running the total including transportation cost to $4,320), taking the bus costs $3,967 in time (for a grand total of $5,473), and driving’s $1,488 yearly cost in time makes for a total of $11,323.40.
The intangibles
There’s another factor to consider. If I want to exercise for an average of 30 minutes a day (and I do), then I achieve that on my bicycle commute. I’m multitasking. If I were to drive to work each day, I’d have to find 30 minutes elsewhere for exercise—meaning I’d have to drive to the gym, for example. If you add that extra 30 minutes each day to driving, it narrows the difference between time saved and widens the value gap.
Then there are intangibles that don’t have a dollar value, like the enjoyment I get from riding a bike that I don’t get from sitting on a bus or behind a wheel. You can also look at the value of reliability. Between unpredictable traffic and various OC Transpo problems, only cycling provides a consistent trip length.
But hold on—this isn’t really fair, is it? Driving has all sorts of other advantages that riding a bike doesn’t have. As we heard from the Mayor during his campaign, nobody in the suburbs takes their kid to ringette practice on their bike in February. There’s simply more you can do with a car: COSTCO runs, getting to the cottage, trips to the airport, and, of course, picking up and dropping off the kids. Caregivers can’t rely on bicycles for unplanned transportation. If you live in a rural area, driving is your only realistic option for getting around. Not everyone has the luxury of ditching their cars and riding a bike everywhere—all those monthly car payments are necessary for their lifestyles, sometimes lifestyles they didn’t choose.
Plus, I’m relatively young, healthy, and comfortable riding in mixed traffic. Not everyone can ride a bike. And not everyone who can ride a bike wants to do so, especially in bad weather. Not everyone lives downtown. Not everyone lives within a bikeable distance of their workplace. To all those people, talking about the incredible cost savings of riding a bike to work looks completely out of touch and even disrespectful. You could say that my life and lifestyle are uniquely well-suited to riding a bike, and that this whole exercise is completely meaningless to other people.
The pool of potential bike commuters
It’s true that I have a situation that allows me to ride a bike for my commute, but it’s not true that I’m unique. Let’s look at the 2021 census data for the riding that has my workplace and home, Ottawa Centre. It’s 32 square kilometres and has a population of 126,000. Two thirds of people live in apartments, a third are between the ages of 25 and 44. If having children is the prime reason for owning a car—and it doesn’t have to be—there are more couples who don’t have kids than do. Another barrier to commuting by bike is distance, but 33% of commutes are under 15 minutes, and 77% are under 29 minutes. Yet 54% of commuters drive, 21% walk, 15% take transit, and only 5% ride a bike.
This data isn’t that precise, and the numbers don’t necessarily overlap. All I want to suggest is that there are more than 5% of people in the ideal circumstances for commuting by bicycle, and plenty more who don’t fit in the ideal circumstances that may still prefer riding a bike. No, not everybody can, should, or needs to ride a bike every day. We don’t need everybody to sell their cars. But there is certainly room to decrease the amount of car commuting from 54% and increase the rate of cycling beyond 5% in the core of the city. In fact, that’s one of the main goals of Ottawa’s new Transportation Master Plan. Building new high-quality cycling infrastructure would help, but there are economic levers that can be pulled as well.
Disincentivizing driving
One way to decrease driving rates doesn’t involve any extra costs—all that’s needed is to make drivers more aware of the hidden costs in owning their vehicle and to challenge their own assumptions about total value. People may overlook their scheduled charges and overestimate the value of the time saved. That’s something I learned through putting together this post. You can run a version of this simulation yourself.
The other thing I learned was it’s not driving that’s expensive, it’s owning and storing a car. Driving, by itself, is cheap—there’s no charge for the use of city roads. Fuel costs can be kept low with an efficient car and nearly eliminated with an electric one. So if you already have a car, there is relatively little additional cost to using it. But because owning and storing is so expensive, drivers seek to maximize and justify their investment by using the car more. And the more they use it, the harder it is to imagine life without a car. The result is more cars on the road and more congestion at peak periods. And remember: Ottawa is growing fast, and new residents will drive too.
Shifting the costs from ownership and storage to usage may cause drivers to rethink the commute. Using my model as an example, a monthly cost of $820 in separate pre-authorized payments is easier to stomach than a per-commute fee of $25 (for my commute, that would be the equivalent of a bus fare for each kilometre travelled). So, how can those costs be shifted?
The most obvious tool is road tolls. If the value of time saved matches the cost, people would pay it; if not, they’d switch to a different mode. A 2017 study of potential road pricing options in Ottawa suggested that a $0.15 per kilometre toll on the 417 or a $5 cordon charge in the core would reduce morning peak vehicle kilometres travelled by up to 250,000 per workday, shift drivers to more sustainable and space-efficient modes, and generate $60 million annual revenue that can be used to fund transportation projects. These are all outcomes that meet the City’s policy goals. Still, road pricing is politically unpopular (though less so following implementation) and would require new infrastructure and a suite of credits for those who require exemptions (such as drivers with low incomes and/or disabilities). It’s safe to say that charging drivers for using roads is not a priority for the municipal or provincial governments.
There are workarounds to government intervention if you want to pay for driving. Car sharing provides the benefits of access to a car without the financial burden of ownership. Aside from a membership fee (between zero and $30 per month), you pay for what you use—much like a toll. If Ottawa allowed car share providers to make their service free-floating (as they do in Toronto and Hamilton), you could drop your car off in a different place than you picked it up, making it more useful for commuting and one-way trips.
Until those policies get changed, I recommend you charge yourself for your drives. If you commute by vehicle within 8 km—and you can ride a bike instead—every time you park your car at the end of a trip, drop $25 into a savings account called BIKE FUND. If you don’t have a bike already, you’ll be able to buy one after your self-imposed fees very quickly.
Happy Let’s Bike Month! You can participate, log your trips, and see how much money you’ve saved by visiting EnviroCentre’s website.
Carrion, Carlos, and David Levinson. “Value of Travel Time Reliability: A Review of Current Evidence.” Transportation Research. Part A, Policy and Practice, vol. 46, no. 4, 2012, pp. 720–41, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tra.2012.01.003.