I’ve been drooling over motorcycles again, and as usual, my friends have been absolutely no help. I know that I am not in the position to buy a bike, but as soon as one of them catches me looking at CycleTrader.com, they all try to talk me into it. Can’t a guy dream in peace?!

The main debating point I get is, “Think about how much you’ll save on gas!” So, I did. I put on my geek hat and figured it out. Once I had the formula, I figured I might as well share it. Now you too can figure out how much you spend on gas!

First what are the known values?

miles/gallon for your vehicle
miles/week you drive your vehicle
dollars/gallon you spend on average

Now, build the formula using unit algebra.

dollars/year = dollars/gallon X gallons/mile X miles/week X weeks/year

For my explorer I have the following values.

13 miles/gallon
100 miles/week
2.90 dollars/gallon

Which yields:

2.9 dollars/gallon
1/13 gallons/mile
100 miles/week
52 weeks/year
---------------
$1160/year

Not to bad, relatively speaking. Now take from that the fact that I can ride my bicycle about two months out of the year (more if I don’t mind my office smelling like a gorilla cage) and the fact that a motorcycle is going to get about 50 miles per gallon with all other numbers the same and here’s what you get.

Explorer + Bicycle
2.9 dollars/gallon
1/13 gallons/mile
100 miles/week
44 weeks/year
---------------
$981/year

Motorcycle + Bicycle
2.9 dollars/gallon
1/50 gallons/mile
100 miles/week
44 weeks/year
---------------
$255/year

So I would save $726/year and it would take about five years to save enough money to offset the price of the motorcycle, riding gear, insurance, license, etc. And that does not take into account all the weeks I would drive my explorer anyway because I’d need to haul something (taking a box to UPS, dry cleaning, bringing a PC home from the office, etc.) or because of bad weather.

I think that’s a pretty good argument against buying a motorcycle right now … but I still want one. *wink*