Ride home for Friday, 14 October

Rode home all the way to the railway crossing on Bayers Road when my chain snapped in the middle of the intersection. Not really wanting to risk running across the intersection to retrieve it to try to hack it back together after it had been driven over a few times, I decided discretion was the better part of valour and called home for a lift. I checked the chainrings later and the middle ring is completely sharktoothed, so I've racked the bike for winter and come the spring I'll get a complete new drivetrain.

I've decided to keep track of costs to try and figure out the cost per km, using a little Perl script I whipped up to store the results in a Mysql database. I've started out with an initial cost of $1200; this covers the new bike ($350), bike trailer ($300), wheels ($260) and handlebar ($70), plus I guessed at around another $200 for clothes and miscellaneous parts, consumables and tools. With the distance I've done so far this year that works out to 21c/km, which compares most favourably with car ownership; last time I did the numbers it would cost me $9500/year for car ownership, which works out at $1.67/km. I believe the quoted figure for depreciation from Revenue Canada is currently something like 33c/km, so even on that rating I'm ahead.

Distance logged: 9.003km
Time: 23:49
Average speed: 22.8km/hr
Max speed: 48 km/hr
Temperature: 14C, cloudy
Cumulative distance: 5692.588km
Cost per km: $0.21