My other zero emissions vehicle

The limelight in the world of smarter greener transport is often hogged by the many wonderful (and yes expensive) electric cars that are now available. Turns out, for personal transport, particularly in urban cycling friendly cities, that shiny big crossover EV is not necessarily the fastest way to get to work. We look at a few commute routes near Toronto and compare cycling to driving and transit via google maps. Generally going in and out of downtown we find cycling to be fairly competitive time-wise, particularly on routes of 5 km or so. When the economics are factored in, cycling is one of the most cost effective ways to get to work.

The optimum modality to get from A to B is hugely dependent on the route, in particular its distance. If A and B are very close, walking is hard to beat. Even if you fancy taking the shiny new EV for a spin, you will need to walk to it, and once in it, will need to take some time to maneuver it out of the garage, and also find a parking space on the other end. These fixed costs mean that walking and by extension cycling, can be faster on a short route. Add in downtown traffic jams, and cycling become quite attractive.

As always, in life, its not just about getting from A to B. Other concerns such as cargo (some of which might have an opinion on the transport modality), weather, sweat, road safety, lunch plans, child care emergencies, and more all play a role too. My goal here is to encourage you my dear reader to consider cycling. You have to decide what makes sense, given your situation.

Methods: We compare google maps derived travel time for walking, cycling, driving and transit for a half dozen of routes in the Toronto area. To account for “fixed” time discussed above (say extracting your car from the Garage, donning your cycling helmet, along with parking on the other end) we add 5 minutes for driving, 3 minutes for cycling, and nothing for walking/transit.

As to economics, we assume walking incurrs no additional expense. Cycling, we budget $1000 for a new bike, along with a $200 annual repair bill, mostly based on my own experience although it seems you can do better. For Transit we take the TTC metropass discount plan times 12 ( source). EV driving we obtain our numbers from a previous blog post, and gas car from Edmunds total cost of ownership plus a 1 USD to 1.3 CAD exchange rate (source).

As you can see from the figures above, walking is the cheapest, while cycling is a close second. I was somewhat surprised by the transit cost, but not so much by the two car’s, which would put a sizable dent in anyone’s budget. Granted, one could argue that having a car nowadays is almost mandatory, particularly if you happen to live in the suburbs. Hence that additional expense of taking the car to work and back are thus relatively small. Nevertheless there are always maintenance/fuel costs associated with any car, and those do tend to increase the more kilometers you drive. Also, cycling/transit might allow you to go from a two car household to a single car household, realizing significant savings.

You could argue that I am somewhat biased in my route selection. I suppose there is truth to that, I picked these routes just about at random, that is random to me. Statistics Canada found that the median distance to work was only 8.7 km (source), in my sample the median is 6.4 km, so a little shorter than Statistics Canada. Looking at the 7.8 km route from High park Zoo to Ryerson University, seems the bicycle did reasonably well, only a little taking slightly longer than the car. Again, my goal here is to simply point out that the bicycle is a wonderful option for those short journeys that make up much of our daily grind.

Walking and cycling are great ways to get around. The economics are very attractive, and for short routes it might very well be the fastest way to get you where you need to go.