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Comment by inteleng | Hacker News Reader

Is this useful?

It certainly added evidence to my view that cycling is a useful form of transit in dense cities. It also added the element of people making deliberate choices in where to live based on transport methods.

On the other hand, you have a history of adding comments like this. Good luck with that.

Edit: I noticed you are editing your comment. When I replied it read "This comment, as nice as it may have sounded to you, doesn't contribute anything to the conversation - in fact, it amounts essentially to bragging."

Thanks for getting my intent. I was more trying to acknowledge my privilege in being able to live within cycling distance of work; tech pays well enough to enable that but many other jobs don't. There's lots of people in NYC who can't afford to live even 40 minutes away from work by mass transit, and who suffer a lot when that mass transit starts getting unreliable.

And, no surprise, a lot of my coworkers who also bike to work similarly choose where they live in order to be within cycling range of work. A monthly bus/subway pass is $116.50, whereas Citi Bike is an annualized $14/month. So you can save $100/month by not needing to take transit, which isn't nothing.

You save $100/month by not needing to take transit, but how much more is housing that's within biking distance? Extending your logic you might as well live within walking distance and save the Citi bike cost, as well.

Well, depends on where you work, and how willing you are to bike long distances, but on average probably more than that. That's why I acknolwedged it's a luxury not available to everyone. Choosing biking over transit adds a level of certainty to travel time that choosing walking over biking does not (as walking is only a little bit more certain than biking). It's the certainty that's really worth paying the extra for.

Don't underestimate the much bigger monthly savings of not owning a car, though. I moved from the suburbs in MD where having a car was essentially required to here, and that saved at least $600 per month. All told I haven't found it much more expensive to live in NYC; yes, rent is more, but transportation costs are way less.

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