Why Two Wheels?

Many people these days are looking at two wheels – often for the first time – as a means of cutting their travel costs. Nothing wrong with that, it’s exactly what a bike or scooter can do brilliantly, but there are many other compelling reasons from easy parking to improving your health.

You can buy a small square of cardboard and a year's worth of overcrowded train trips, or have one of these* Costs
Choose the right machine and you can save thousands of pounds, and fuel economy is only the beginning. Small motorcycles and scooters can offer well over 100mpg, some substantially more (see the Honda CBF125 test), but in addition to that they are cheaper to service and insure than a car and will cost you far less in depreciation. An £8000 car will depreciate roughly £2700 in its first year – you can buy a good scooter or small motorcycle for that, and it will depreciate by around £900. And remember, putting miles on a motorcycle or scooter instead of your car holds up the car’s value and reduces its running costs too.

Even an ultra high performance superbike will easily better 40mpg, most will approach 50mpg with just a little restraint. And they make commuting more fun...

As for public transport, an annual season ticket can cost more than a new two wheeler including insurance, fuel and bike clothing, and 12 months later it’s a worthless piece of cardboard.

Parking is either free or far cheaper than with a car, and mostly it’s also possible to park much nearer to where you want to be. That makes a big difference to the next section...



The bike went straight to the front, while the lights changed four times before the cars got there...* Time
For those in the know, this is a more powerful reason even than cost or environmental concerns for using a bike or scooter. The staggering reductions in journey times are persuasive enough: in big city rush hour commuting, a two-wheeler typically takes a third to a half of the time a car would. 30 minutes to get to work instead of an hour by car saves you 60 minutes a day, five hours a week, 10 days a year!

But even that is not the whole story: bikes give you dependable journey times. Suppose you have to be at an important meeting 50 miles away, much of it motorway, at 9am. Travel by car and heavy rush hour traffic means you have to leave at 6.30am just to make sure you don’t get caught if it’s especially heavy, and chances are, you’ll arrive at 7.30am, bleary from the early start but ironically now with time to kill. You might have made it leaving at 7.30am, but you might not, and even if you do you’ll be stressed from the worry every time the traffic backs up.

So go by bike. Off peak the trip takes the same time as a car, an hour door to door. In the rush hour, it might be an extra 15 minutes, so allow another 15 minutes on top of that in case it’s exceptionally bad, set off at 7.30am and you’ll arrive comfortably early, unstressed and you’ll have had an extra hour in bed.

Compared with public transport, the time savings can be even better. Tubes are faster station to station, but unless you work near one and live near another, on the same line, they won’t be faster door to door. As for trains and buses, they’re slow, unreliable, strike prone and unpleasant to use, and you have to schedule your day around them. Having to stay an extra 10 minutes in the office can mean missing a train and waiting another hour for the next. With your own wheels you go when you’re ready. You’re master of your own time.



The extra time and reduced stress bikes give you improve the quality of your life* Quality of life
Take a look at this survey carried out in 2004: BDO Stoy Hayward scooter study. By switching to basic scooters these city workers had more time to themselves, became less stressed and their health improved because they were spending more time cooking proper meals, going to the gym and so on. Some even reported better sex lives! And look at my Safety section: you’re no longer exposed to all those filthy bugs and viruses swilling around trains and buses crammed with people from every walk of life – two wheeler users get coughs, colds and worse a lot less often than public transport commuters.

Another reason to feel good - you benefit from switching to bikes, and so can the environmentIn the early 2000s the AA surveyed commuters into London and found that two out of three bike and scooter riders actively enjoyed their journey into work and looked forward to it. Train, bus or car commuters? Only a handful.



* Environment
It’s not just the lower fuel usage and emissions which make bikes a good idea: because they’re much smaller than cars they use far less raw material – a typical medium motorcycle weighs a tenth of a medium sized car, so that’s one tenth of the steel, plastic (from oil) and aluminium and a tenth of the energy used to build it. Bikes do much less damage to the roads too, so these need fewer repairs, saving more energy and cost.