How Much Is Your Commute Saving You and the Earth?

Biking to work is all sorts of fun, but occasionally you get that smartass who doesn't believe you're saving all that much money or making much of a difference in your riding. Well, thanks to the folks at the Bay Area Bike Coalition, you can find out almost exactly what you're doing for yourself, your wallet, and the environment each day.

Check out this link. Its results for me:
You have burned 286.20000000000005 calories.
You have saved $3.38 by not driving.
You have saved the earth 6.5 lbs of toxic emissions.

Multiply that times the number of days I bike to work, and that's not too shabby. Now, it's not perfect - the amount of money I save doesn't include how much I'd pay for parking at OSU for work, but it's close.

People, not speed.


  1. i think there are probably multipliers, too - like shrinking all the wrong parts of the economy (auto dealers) while growing all the right ones (bike shops).

  2. This is way cool Jamie. My results were:

    You have burned 472 calories.
    You have saved $4.20 by not driving.
    You have saved the earth 7.8 lbs of toxic emissions.

    Which, if I am conservative and say I ride 208 days a year would mean 98,176 calories, $873.60, and 1622.4 tons of emissions (unless I've had hot wings or tacos).

  3. Yeah, it's neat to see all your work put out into hard numbers (as hard as such a set of numbers can be, anyway).

    I actually had to re-run mine because I only figured it for a one-way trip (I hadn't had coffee yet and the baby was up early this morning). :)

  4. Those folks in the Bay Area are obviously very smart.


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