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The Most Efficient Traveler Isn’t a Bird or a Fish—It’s You on a Bike
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
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Maintenance cost? It's negligible. The cost of part and maintenance in a year, assuming you buy Decathlon stuff and do it yourself, will likely cost less than your fuel for your car in a month. Electric car might cost less with the maintenance, but the tire itself will also eat up the cost sooner or later.
Both type of car is also expensive to purchase, while on the other hand you can get a $300 Chinese bike, optimise it a bit, and it will go for years before you need to replace anything.
Much less than the fuel for the car, likely even less than the electricity for an electric car.
Road bike tires (the only kind you should use for commuting on paved roads) last between 2500 and 6500km. If you don't skid while braking (which you shouldn't ever do anyway) and use the correct pressure it's easy to push that figure towards the top of the bracket.
Disk brake pads last between 8000 and 16000km.
Tubes last between 1500 and 8000km.
The chain lasts between 3000 and 5000km, and shifting correctly makes them last a lot longer.
If you shift correctly and replace the chain in time, the sprocket never wear out. I had a road bike from the 70s that I used quite heavily for about 10 years and it still had the original sprockets and shifters.
Pedals, cranks and bottom bracket also only fail if you abuse them (e.g. never shift).
Which leaves the pull wires (for breaks and shifters) and the grip tape, which both last very long and are very cheap.
All other parts only break when abused or in an accident.
So if we say you are commuting your bike and it's 50km per day, 5 days a week without counting vacation and stuff, then that's 13 000km.
That means:
Prices are name-brand products from Amazon.
That's €163 in total. You could probably even go cheaper than that, and 50km per day is quite a lot as well. If you take care of your bike, you can push the components much farther too, since I only took the average values.
A more likely value if you are careful while riding and maybe only commute 20km/day, you probably won't have more maintainance cost than €40-50/year.
Maybe I wasn't clear. I meant the maintenance cost for the road (and the bike, but I suspect the road is the bigger cost). Clarified in the original.
Also significantly less. The reason road needed to repair is usually caused by ground erosion(which will happened regardless), tree root damage(which will also happened regardless), and the vehicle(plus speed) moving above. The heavier the vehicle using it, the quicker the road will be damaged. The weight of a sedan + driver is usually 10 times or more heavier than bicycle + rider, and the speed of a car on the road is usually 3 to 4 times of the bike. Unless the bikelane is build on top of ground that is prone to movement or near a big tree, it will last way longer than the road build solely for car.
Good point, thanks