2011 Mileage count survey

This topic has 80 replies, 25 voices, and was last updated 13 years, 1 month ago by americancyclo.

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January 2, 2012 at 1:39 am #934060

americancyclo
Participant

Anyone from BikeArlington or WABA want to weigh in on the commonly used definitions of a bicycle trip and how best to explain that in the survey?

January 2, 2012 at 2:01 am #934062

dbb
Participant

I would offer a contrary position that a trip is out and back. Just as I wouldn’t consider the break for lunch to be the end of one Saturday ride and beginning of another, to me a commute is out and back.

Granted, my ride count will skyrocket if I can count each commute as two.

I will reenter my data if the approach is to count legs rather than trips.

January 2, 2012 at 2:17 am #934064

btj
Participant

If there is a change of clothes out of my biking gear, a significant amount of time between (i.e. multiple hours), or for some lucky people, a shower, I consider that the end of one trip. My commute to and from work has 8+ hours in between them and a change into work clothes so I counted that as two trips.

January 2, 2012 at 3:55 am #934068

creadinger
Participant

@btj 12481 wrote:

If there is a change of clothes out of my biking gear, a significant amount of time between (i.e. multiple hours), or for some lucky people, a shower, I consider that the end of one trip. My commute to and from work has 8+ hours in between them and a change into work clothes so I counted that as two trips.

I completely see your point about the change of clothes, multiple hours in between rides etc and how a commute could logically be counted as two rides, however, I just don’t feel like a ride is completed until I’m back at home, or if I’m on a tour, my bike and I are at our final destination for the day. It’s hard to explain, but maybe consider it as the work is still not done for the day, and there is still some riding left to do, so the ride isn’t quite over yet.

On the other hand, to compare with CaBi data, any individual trip where one would re-rack the bike at a station to go on with their day – like a ride to work or home, should probably be treated as individual trips like you have done.

I never really considered total trips to be an important piece of information to track before though so I never put much actual thought into it until now. For the past few years I just add up the total miles for a bike on a given day no matter how many separate rides it was.

January 2, 2012 at 1:25 pm #934072

CCrew
Participant

@dbb 12479 wrote:

I would offer a contrary position that a trip is out and back.

My mindset was a “trip” was the distance to reach my destination, whether that destination was work or home. I can certainly understand either way, frankly I think the # of trips is a moving metric no matter how it’s measured.

January 2, 2012 at 2:22 pm #934073

culimerc
Participant

@CCrew 12489 wrote:

My mindset was a “trip” was the distance to reach my destination, whether that destination was work or home. I can certainly understand either way, frankly I think the # of trips is a moving metric no matter how it’s measured.

Personally, I work off the purpose of the ride. Commute is to and from. Dinner ride is to and from. Both separated by hours before completion. A training ride, followed by an errand ride, followed by a ride to dinner would be 3. But that’s just me.

January 2, 2012 at 3:18 pm #934074

americancyclo
Participant

@creadinger 12485 wrote:

I never really considered total trips to be an important piece of information to track before though so I never put much actual thought into it until now.

I’ve never considered “number of trips” important either, and I don’t think it’s a meaningful metric for any individual. I think the metric is important for cities and counties that can use that number to leverage money for bike improvements on the idea that if an individual is making more trips by bicycle, they are more likely to make purchases in that specific area.

Rider A claiming one trip (commute to work and back) is less appealing, economically at least, than Rider B that claims four trips (to work, from work, errand ride, leisure ride)

That’s just a guess on my part though.

January 2, 2012 at 10:20 pm #934081

americancyclo
Participant

as of right now, we’ve had 32 members respond with a total of 134,777.12 miles. I figure I’ll keep an eye on the numbers until the end of the week, in case any folks are out of town and completely unplugged.

January 3, 2012 at 12:15 am #934082

eminva
Participant

Wow, that’s an average of over 4200 per person! I’m a piker.

Liz

January 3, 2012 at 1:28 am #934083

Riley Casey
Participant

Thats just what we need. Cycling optimized forum software that includes our weekly mileage along with our post count. :rolleyes:

January 3, 2012 at 4:14 pm #934094

Dirt
Participant

@KLizotte 12408 wrote:

How much CO2 emissions have we avoided?

I was away and didn’t see this until today. Sorry that I didn’t get in earlier.

As for CO2 emissions savings, that depends on what you would drive if you were not riding. For me, my car gets around 20mpg for my average driving. Since burning one gallon of gasoline emits 19.6 pounds of CO2, it means that my mileage divided by 1.03 gets me my CO2 savings. My CO2 savings last year was just under 13,000 pounds. That is somewhat of an artificial number…. Basically that was “what if I drove everywhere I rode in 2011” scenario. It isn’t totally removed from reality. The last few years that I drove, I generally put between 10 and 12,000 miles on my car and rode my bike between 2 and 3000 miles.

Thanks for setting this up.

Pete

January 3, 2012 at 4:16 pm #934095

Dirt
Participant

@americancyclo 12498 wrote:

in case any folks are out of town and completely unplugged.

I was in town, but my brain was completely unplugged.

January 3, 2012 at 4:21 pm #934098

jrenaut
Participant

@Dirt 12512 wrote:

The last few years that I drove, I generally put between 10 and 12,000 miles on my car and rode my bike between 2 and 3000 miles.

Once I get a computer, I think I’m going to set up a Tumblr or something to track miles in the car vs miles on the bike. The car is still going to win – most of my car trips are longer than most of my bike trips – but offsetting that is that most of the car trips are with a full car. Four people in a car getting 25-30 mpg is a pretty light carbon footprint.

January 3, 2012 at 6:12 pm #934110

dbb
Participant

While I will need to noodle through the numbers a bit, the May 2011 issue of Scientific American offers a comparison between the CO2 emissions of people vs cars.

http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-cars-are-greener-than-people

They report that the CO2 emissions of four men running exceeds the CO2 emissions of a hybrid car (in grams CO2 per km). Obviously that doesn’t consider the source and carbon footprint of the fuel source for the cars and runners. The graphic with this piece shows cyclists beat other modes (driving, running, walking) cleanly.

The graphic shows a gasoline car emitting about 121 g CO2 per kilometer and four cyclists (a car’s worth of people) at about 25 g CO2 per kilometer

January 3, 2012 at 9:59 pm #934129

KLizotte
Participant

Oiy! regarding the trip count issue. You’re all correct; without a clear definition the metric is fairly meaningless. I’d originally proposed it since most other bike surveys use it even though I was far more interested in calculating average trip mileage.

I think it would have been far more meaningful to ask people what their average DAILY (M-F and weekend) mileage is instead. Opps. Improvements for next year. We can still come up with a a rough across-the-board count for that one though.

If you haven’t entered your 2011 mileage yet, please do so – no number is too small!
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