See my data table if you'd like.

Back to post / website. View/add comments for this article. As an experiment I decided to compare the difference between catching the bus and riding my bike into work. Some background: my house is in Indooroopilly and my work is in Brisbane city. Both locations have bus stops very close by. A one way 'go card' trip from my house to the city costs $2.32. The route from my house to the city is quite bike-friendly, with wide roads and some separate bike paths...but there are some reasonably off-putting hills along the way. My fitness level is good, but not exceptional. My bike is very basic and not ideal. After five days of cycling and five days of catching the bus, here are the results. The average time spent "in the saddle" was 20.9 minutes inbound and 23.2 minutes outbound. The is plus a 3.5 minute shower at home and a 9 minute shower/shampoo at work (which I would have had at another time of the day/night, but I'll ignore that fact and keep the extra shower in this study). By comparison, the bus trips took an average of 25.5 minutes inbound and 18.3 minutes outbound. This was plus an average of 4.1 minutes spent waiting for the inbound bus and 3 minutes for the outbound. Plus the time spent walking to and from the bus stops. Here's a graphical comparison of times. Surprisingly, cycling to work takes me a round trip 30 seconds less than catching the bus! My results show that by cycling just three days per week across the 48 weeks working year I will save $665.28 in fares, plus gain the fitness of pedalling 2117 kilometres. It costs me no extra time and only leads to incremental rises in my food and laundry expenses. So I wonder...how do the benefits of cycling work for you?