Miles Ridden VS Miles Driven

I’ve never kept track of mileage on the bike. I don’t have an odometer and I don’t think my phone would stay charged long enough to do so. When riding away from home we might track miles on Nova’s cyclocomputer to know our location on a route but the amount of miles we ride really isn’t important to me. I did get to thinking though, I wonder if I rode more miles than we drove this year? I did some very rough estimating and figuring of both the mileage on our bikes and in the car.

There were a couple of months this year Nova did track our riding miles on her most ridden bike and if I recall it averaged out to a little over 100 miles a week so I’ll go with 100. That’s 5,200 miles for the year. That would be the high end. I also know that a minimum ride for me is about 10 miles and I ride probably 6 days a week which is 3,120 miles. That’s the low end. So I’m going in the middle of these 2 estimates with 4000 miles of riding for the year.

I don’t know the exact mileage for the car for the year. I do know we left San Diego to head home on the 1st of January. When we arrived home the car was in need of an oil change having 10,000 miles on it. The car now has 13,700. If I add an approximated 1,500 miles for the drive home from CA to the 3,700 that’s 5,200 for the year. So it’s highly unlikely that I will have ridden more miles than we drove for the year. Some of the other miles on the car were shorter trips, the Nebraska border and northwest Kansas are first to come to mind. If I exclude just the drive home from CA then I’m positive I rode more miles than we drove.

Our rides are for errands and entertainment and many of them are miles that would have been driven if not ridden. Even knowing that I rode more than we drove locally makes me happy.