There are some fascinating things you can do with meticulous records-keeping. One of them is driving yourself crazy looking at numbers, or realizing exactly where your retirement is going. But those aren't fun things.
When I started building the race car waaaay back in '06, I kept a spreadsheet of every cost, every part, every source, everything pertaining to how I put that car together. It revealed absolutely staggering costs over time, and all of my racing buddies thought I was crazy to ever look at that kind of data. Ultimately that sheet was a big part in my decision to walk away from the sport, even as it taught me how to maximize resource-utilization and focus spending on key areas.
But I do like analytics, so when I bought my race bike in 2015, I started a new spreadsheet. This one logs every component on every bike, serial numbers, costs, sources, dates installed (to roughly calculate service intervals), services performed, has 3 whole sections for gearing calculations (one for road, one for mountain, and one for maximizing junior gearing options), and enables me to keep track of spare parts.
Of course, that spreadsheet also reveals a fairly absurd amount of moneys spent over the past 3 years, but it also enabled me to discover some rather fascinating metrics. Yesterday I jumped on Strava and pulled total mileage for every bike, then updated my Veloviewer data to get total time for every bike, then enter those data against total costs invested in each bike, to reveal a cost per mile and cost per hour for each.
Some things popped immediately. For one, road bikes, no matter the cost or category, deliver lower cost across both metrics than CX or mountain bikes. Conversely, the mountain bikes cost a literal order of magnitude more across both time and distance metrics.
The biggest surprise was that Alastair's road bike has hands-down the lowest TCO of anything in our fleet, at $.41 per mile and $5.98 per hour. His mountain bike, though? $8.47 per mile and $60.26 per hour. And those numbers represent an aggregate of both his time and my time on that bike. And we bought it USED. With no major upgrades and just a 3x9 to 1x10 conversion, that's a terrible return on investment. It will come down with use, but there's the rub: he's not terribly interested in it, so those numbers aren't likely to go down any time soon.
Overall, the road bikes generally cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $.50 / mile and ~$9 / hour. The 'cross bikes, weirdly, have almost identical numbers for both, even though I've used mine on big gravel grinders: about $2.20 / mile and $26 / hour. The mountain bikes, as mentioned, incur outrageous cost. Mine runs $5.57 / mile and $47.47 / hour.
Another interesting element to the cost of mountain biking is that, for the most part, there are secondary costs involved in even starting the ride. I cannot, for instance, easily ride the mountain bike from my house or office to any decent trail system. That means taking the truck, and its 16 mpg mid-grade fuel requirements, along with any ancillary parking costs, plus time of travel, which on the road bikes is just part of the ride. To put that into perspective, a 3-hour ride at Pocahontas State Park involves 2 hours of driving (~5 gallons of gas) and $6 of parking. If I take Alastair with me, that works out to:
5 x $2.89 (gas) = $14.45
$6 (parking)
3 x $47.47 (my mtb) = $142.41
3 x $60.26 (his mtb) = $180.78
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Total: $343.64
That's ONE DAY of mountain bike riding, which is insane. By comparison, rolling 3 hours on road bikes from the house:
no gas, no parking
3 x $8.96 (my commuter/beater) = $26.88
3 x $5.98 (his road bike) = $17.94
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Total: $44.82
For those of you playing the home game, that's a $300 difference for a day on the bikes. Now granted, the bike costs are largely sunk, but if I were doing a costing analysis prior to getting into cycling, there's no way I would run those numbers and decide to buy a mountain bike.
And the nuttiest thing of all is that I basically DIDN'T buy a mountain bike. I won a shopping spree and got my 2017 Giant Anthem 2 for about $400 NEW. Aside from my dumpster bike, it had the lowest buy-in of anything I own, but the running cost is no less absurd.
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