Calculator: Your Lovely Cycling Commute vs. Your Nasty Other Commute

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How much are you saving on your bike commute?

There are lots of calculators out there, but I recently discovered one that's very well presented, fun, and pleasantly smug.

Cycletoworkcalculator.com, Twitter tagline "smug cycling calculator for clever commuters", has gotten off to a great start with over 20,000 calculations in under two months. 

I emailed with Steve Morgan, the London cyclist who created the Cycle to Work Calculator. From Steve:

The trigger for building the calculator was seeing my cycle computer log 17,000 to and from work in London. I have commuted by bike pretty much every day of my student and working life - through sun, rain and snow so I started calculating my savings in my head.  

After I had been talking to colleagues at work about how they were starting to have financial issues through higher bills, higher gas costs and train fares, their partners losing their jobs, pay freezes etc, I built the calculator initially to show them how much they would save by cycling to work. I also posted it on Twitter and within that week my server had already crashed under the demand! I have upgraded twice since then already. It has obviously struck a chord with the rest of the cycling community which is fantastic news. 

http://twitter.com/#!/search/cycletoworkcalculator.com 

There have been over 20,000 calculations since it launched at the end of June.  

My hope with the website is that it will encourage more people out of their cars and onto bikes after hearing other cyclists talking about how much money we have saved each year by cycling to work!

More about the Cycle to Work Calculator:

The Cycle to Work Calculator http://www.cycletoworkcalculator.com was built by Steve Morgan, 36, an all-weather commuting cyclist living and working in London, UK, as a web designer. The simple online app uses the latest web technologies (HTML5, CSS3 and Responsive Web Design) to deliver actual and projected financial savings of cycling to work versus driving or public transport, clearly formatted automatically to whatever device is being used, such as smartphones, iPads and laptops.

Note: At first glance it may appear that it only calculates in Pounds, but you can toggle through to change the currency to USD if you're here in the U.S.

I did a screen capture to try it out:

How much are you saving? Give us a tweet or leave a comment below. 

Get updates on the calculator on Twitter at @cycletoworkcalc

Joe @ BCN