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In three previous posts, I’ve had fun calculating the fuel efficiency of a bicycle to be roughly 684 mpg (biodiesel equivalent). That’s fine as far as it goes, but bicycle riders do not really slurp oils for all their energy. One thing we notice is that as we ride a lot, our food bill goes up. What happens when we skip the environmental goodness, and look at economic costs per mile?

The reference trip I’ve been using was 26 miles long and cost about 1169 calories, or 45 calories per mile. Let’s assume a somewhat average car makes that trip at 26 mpg, using one gallon of gas. At local prices that’s about $2.80, or $0.11 per mile. How does a bike compare?

If I stop at Pasta Bravo, as I sometimes have done, and order a Chicken Linguine Pesto, I score 1015 calories, which is close enough. Unfortunately an order of will cost me $6.99, or $0.27 per mile. Oops! Of course, if I consider the pasta to be tasty, the ride to be fun, and get some bigger muscles out of the deal, I might be ahead. That’s a value judgement.

It’s interesting that it basically takes one whole meal to “pay for” a 26 mile ride.

It might be amusing though to figure some other costs per mile, based on other typical riding foods:

Stopping at a bagel shop (300 calories, $0.79), I learn that I only get 6 or 7 miles per bagel. That’s not as far as I thought I could go. For 26 miles I need 4 bagels, for $3.16 … hey, we’re back in car territory, at $0.12 per mile.

Another common food for me is energy bars, Clif (245 calories, $0.99) or Promax (300 calories, $1.09). That works out to 5 Clif bars, for $4.95 or $0.19 per mile, or 4 Promax bars, for $4.36, or $0.17 per mile.

The ultimate fallback in bicycling food is a bowl of oatmeal. My big canister of Smart and Final instant oats cost about $2.50 for 31 servings of 140 calories each ($0.08 per serving). Unfortunately it takes 8 of those plain oatmeal servings to fuel my ride. If I could stomach that much, it would be $0.64 or about $0.02 per mile.

Oatmeal seems like the winner, but like my Danish grandparents, I better pile on the brown sugar, butter, and cream, to get the calorie count for each serving a little higher. Two servings is probably my limit.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 11th, 2005 at 7:29 am and is filed under Environment, General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.