Tired of spending so much money on parking, gas and maintenance? Well, we may have a solution for you. By implementing the swiss-army knife of transportation into your vehicle toolkit, you can easily save hundreds a month on your travel expenses.
After years of making fun of folding bikes, I bought one on a whim and it changed my life. It turns out that adding a folding bike to your toolkit really unlocks a bunch of options that make life cheaper and better in other ways too. This is because folding bikes are the keys to unlocking the benefits of multimodal transportation. Since a folding bike fits in every other larger vehicle–car, truck, bus, plane, ferry–your ability to cover terrain and explore is magnified by the carry-on sized bike.
Bottom line: putting a folding bike in the trunk of your car will save you money and time. This article itemizes those savings. Then prepares you to harness them.
The Art of Urban Survival: Parking
In order to balance their budgets, many cities have started to price parking closer to open market prices than ever before. This makes sense: land is expensive and parking lots need to make revenue. It’s fairly normal, even in car-friendly cities like Detroit and L.A., to spend $50 on parking a day. If that’s something you have to do even just once a week, you spend $2400 a year on parking alone.
Many people try to avoid these high costs by driving around looking for cheaper or free-to-them parking. According to INRIX, a transportation data analytics company, Americans spend an average 17 hours a year looking for parking. Astoundingly, the average San Franciscan car user spends 85 hours cruising for parking. This time wasted not doing better things comes with even more costs: vehicle wear and tear, fuel burnt, unnecessary pollution and stress–lots and lots of stress. But you know that. You’re an urban survivalist.
So how does a folding bike solve any of these problems? The hinges in this type of bike make it a portable tool that you can pocket in your trunk. The trick with the folding bike is that biking a mile only takes about 7 minutes. Less if you like moving fast, a bit longer if you’re more into leisure. The crazy thing is that in city traffic, biking (or taking a scooter) is typically faster than driving or even taking the bus. Using this pocket tool you will slice through traffic you used to sit in. No matter the traffic conditions, however, biking always takes about 7 minutes a mile, so you can count on that.
What this means is that you can park 1-2 miles away from where we’re going (usually work or school) and ride a bike or scooter the rest of the way. As a result, you may be able to both save on parking costs, reduce wear on your car and maybe even save time commuting too!
How to Save Thousands of Dollars a Year with a Folding Bike
What follows is a general plan to potentially save thousands of dollars a year by incorporating a folding bike into one of your regular commutes. By finding efficient routes between affordable parking areas and your frequent destinations, you can transform your daily travel into a more economical, healthy, and often quicker experience.
Before we begin…
This is not a get-rich-quick scheme, but rather a practical approach to saving money and time through smart commuting. Folding bikes are powerful tools to add to your toolkit, much like pressure cookers or Peloton bikes. However, as with any tool, you only reap the benefits when you use them consistently. Before investing in a folding bike, it's crucial to question everything and ensure there's a good, high-quality route between a cheap parking spot and your destination. Just as you wouldn't buy a boat without water to sail it on, a folding bike is most valuable when it fits seamlessly into your daily commute.
Who this is for
If you habitually go somewhere that requires paid parking, either daily or monthly, you stand to save a significant amount of money. By incorporating a few minutes of cycling into your commute strategy, you can park where it's cheap or free and bike the rest of the way. Consider this: cycling a mile typically takes about seven minutes, which is often faster than navigating regular traffic.
Prospecting for parking:
Our current goal is to lower the cost of our commute. To do this we are going to search for
cheap parking and a good bike route to go with it. The best way to start is with maps, and in this digital age this means navigation apps. Playing with mapping apps is a fun, mind-stimulating task. It’s kind of like those mind-expanding apps they advertise on YouTube videos, except this one pays you!
There’s different approaches to solve this logistics challenge:
You can start by finding great parking and then scout for a good bike route
You can search a great bike route and scout for good parking along it
Approach 1: Finding cheap parking, then looking for a route:
Use a parking app like Spothero or Parkopedia to find parking first. These apps show you the parking, public, private and on-street near some destination. Put in your destination address in one of these parking apps, and zoom out, looking towards where you will come from. Once you’ve found a cheap lot or free parking, take note of the address or a nearby address.
Your next step will be to use this cheap parking address as a starting point and navigate to your actual destination using the bike instructions. More on this a bit later.
Approach 2: Find a good route, look for great parking on that route:
There are two main scenarios when looking for a bike route first.
You know of a great bike route near your destination:
If personal experience has taught you about a great bike trail or dedicated bike infrastructure passing close to your destination, follow this trail out a mile or two to find free or cheap parking. It’s fairly easy to follow bike routes using CycleOSM.
You're searching for a bike route:
If you don't know whether there's a suitable bike route near your end destination, start your digital scouting with CycleOSM.
CycleOSM is a little-known app for bike users that shows all available data on bike lanes and infrastructure in painstaking detail. While its interface can be somewhat hard to read, it's currently the best tool to get an idea of what cycling infrastructure is available in your area. In CycleOSM, the bluest lines are the best lines.
Using CycleOSM to hunt for routes to cheap parking:
Identify potential bike routes near your destination, like your job or the gym.
Follow these routes out to a suitable distance, probably in the direction of your regular drive.
Now, by reading the name of the road or bike trail you can use this information to search for parking out some distance.
CycleOSM Screenshot
For example, There’s plenty of street parking near Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital, not far from exit Exit 432 (Cesar Chavez) on the 101 in San Francisco. It’s about two miles From downtown.
I found this by following a bike lane out from where I work in San Francisco. I found a highway exit I take often. I picked an address at random and put that into Parkopedia and found that there is lots of street parking there.
At this first stage you have proven to yourself that there is a 14-minute route (or faster) between cheap parking and your destination. Now before we go on any further, we should see if it makes financial sense to buy a folding bike to use on this one habitual trip with parking
Estimating Your Savings
Now that we’ve found a good-enough potential route, let’s calculate our potential savings. As an example, if you drive to work 5 days a week and you pay only $25 for parking every day. You could save as much as $6000 assuming you only take 2 weeks “off” for vacation and illness (No, we don’t like the economic system either.)
Now, many people don’t like to ride in the rain (not yet at least), so we could consider those days. For this example, we are considering the San Francisco Bay Area, where the author lives. We have had about 80 days of rain in the past two years. So, let’s say all those coincide with your work days. That reduces the number of rideable days to 150, or 62% of all drive-to-work days. So the potential savings is $3720, a significant amount.
Cost of bike purchase
The most basic accessories you will need is a helmet and a cell phone holder. You’ll certainly acquire lights, vest and other accessories if you successfully integrate the folder into one or more of your trips.
ITEM | COST |
New high-quality folding bike | $1000 |
Helmet | $70 |
Cell Phone holder | $35 |
Weight | 23 - 27lbs |
If your destination is at the top of a large hill, or you want to cycle at 20 miles an hour the whole way (making your commute lightning fast), then consider adding electric capability. Adding electronic equipment adds cost, weight and maintenance complexity.
Item | Cost |
Additional Cost | $500 - $1000 |
Additional Weight | 10-25 lbs |
Range | 30 - 60mi depending on assistance level |
Lifetime (obsolescence) | e-bikes sadly often become e-waste. Expect 10 years of useful life from a good e-folding bike. Cheap ones last 1-3 years. |
Year one savings:
Net savings of replacing the last mile of your commute 60% of the time:
Bike Type | Year 1 Savings |
Regular Foldie | $2515 |
e-foldie | $1685 |
Year two savings:
Spend $250 on premium upgrades like fancy lighting, some bags, and cool wheel lights:
Bike Type | Year 2 Savings |
Regular Foldie | $2515 |
e-foldie | $1685 |
(We subtracted $50 for the electricity to charge the bike every day for a year.)
Now stop
Look at those numbers
Do you realize that the savings —from parking alone— are so massive that you could literally but a regular folding bike and throw it away EVERY YEAR and still save money?If the math adds up for you, the next step is to consider other logistical aspects related to bike ownership and use. You can read more about the practicalities of bike use and ownership in this overview article.
Consider the Real World
Digital scouting with maps and apps can show potential bike routes between cheap parking and your destination. However, the key question is: How good is the route in real life?
Savings come from consistently using your folding bike, not just owning it. Before committing:
Assess ride quality: Most people prefer (and deserve) comfortable, safe routes.
Check for potential issues: Uneven surfaces, trash, excessive noise, or other frustrations.
Remember: While the savings are significant, it's harder to maintain new habits if the daily experience is unpleasant.
A quick real-world test ride can confirm if your chosen route is truly viable for regular use. So you want to borrow a bike, or rent one, or move a regular big bike to your chosen cheap parking and test the ride to your oft-visited place, like work, school or the gym. Or, there may be so many options for riding that you just buy a bike right away - you can do that too!
Navigation for bikes, scooters and other human-sized vehicles
When you do test out the ride, you may want to use a dedicated micro-mobility navigation app. They use the same basic OSM data as Cycleosm uses. In the US we recommend Pointz Mobility, a start up from Providence, RI dedicated to providing micro mobility users with good routing. Unlike Google, Apple, and Waze, Pointz app suggest routes that don't just vary in terms of “speed” but also pleasure and safety.
The Pointz interface lets you put in your origin and destination address and then provides you with a slider to help you choose routes based on how safe/pleasant or challenging/dangerous you want a ride to be. When you select the most “flexible” route you’re telling Pointz that you can put up with serious annoyances. Pointz will show you a route, using a color code to let you know how bike friendly or unfriendly a segment of the route is. All green is the dream with this routing app.
If you’ve found lots of “green” routes in Pointz you have a higher degree of certainty that this foldie is about to save you thousands and give you more freedom of movement. That said, no matter what app you use (you might try Cyclers and Komoot), maps are maps and cannot be fully trusted. (And actually, you really can’t fully trust bike mapping solutions. You can learn more about that here)
What might you find on your first ride?
If you scout the route on the weekend, or take time after work one day, you’ll discover lots of interesting things. You may find that a piece of the route is blocked by construction. Or you may find that a piece of the route has been upgraded to a protected bike lane. In some places bike riding on the sidewalk is not only legal but more pleasant. Beyond logistic practicalities, you may find a great new destination like a cafe, bar or museum you’d never seen.
Conclusion:
Now you have most of the conceptual tools you need to save money through multimodal biking. By adding a bike to your travel toolkit, you gain freedom, save money and increase your physical and mental well-being. At this point you may be asking yourself, which foldie do I buy or how do I try one out? We’re working on a buyer’s guide to folding bikes. If you’re interested in this article, send us a message using the form below.
In the meantime, if you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, we would like to help you 1:1. We are developing software and products to help people determine whether a bike is right for them, what trips they can be used on, how much money they stand to save. We also calculate reduction of carbon footprint, and fitness metrics.
Stay tuned for more content and resources to save money, live better and tread lightly in the world.
Special thanks go to J. Raterman and C. Baer for all their edits, advice and guidance.
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