What's your dollars per ride.

Jim Junkie

Used to sell drugs, now he just takes them
Weird that my cheapest $per ride bike is also the commuter. It's kind of like those matres salespeople who tell you to spend 1/3 of your income on a bed because you spend 1/3 of your life on a bed.

My MTB $/ride wouldn't be so bad if stuff stopped breaking on it! It's why most of us have at least two!
Comparatively the commuter is a lot simpler bike too. There's a considerably larger cost in just keeping the mtb going with bearings, shock servicing, breaking derailleurs in half & so on. The commuter could have been a lot cheaper too; but like you say with the mattress salespeople, it might as well be nice if I'm spending so much time on it!

The solution is to start commuting on your MTB :)
I did that for a few years - would not recommend. Wore out all the bits, not as comfortable for grinding km's and much slower. Great for hitting stairs and the pump track on the way home though, so there's that. Having 160mm of travel up your sleave can also come in handy when you don't see the rather large traffic divider in front of you and just plough into it.
 

Chriso_29er

Likes Bikes and Dirt
Having 160mm of travel up your sleave can also come in handy when you don't see the rather large traffic divider in front of you and just plough into it.
Haha,

Would have saved me from a little embarrassment when I jumped a gutter out the front of work on my road bike, found myself a little far forward on soft grass and promptly went over the bars.
 

madstace

Likes Dirt
You should ask Poodle how well that's working out for him ;)
In fairness he seems to plot a course from one dodgy part of Newie to another, and yes thats within the context of Newcastle being one big dodgy area.

As for the mattress salesman argument, I reckon that raises a good point. Everyone has been listing their KMs but given MTB is generally a lower average speed/distance, shouldn't hours per ride be a factor. Either way I'm not doing exact maths, but on rough calcs of 3 rides a week, my last steed gave me $6.40 a ride over 8 years, which seems pretty bloody good to me. Too damn early to work out the new one, but it puts just as big a smile on my face.

My commuting days in 2018 basically paid for my flat bar in less than a year, and that was just off the parking money I saved!
 

Jim Junkie

Used to sell drugs, now he just takes them
Hmm, probably not a good thing to check but here goes:

Current Bike: Banshee Spitfire V2
Cost: Let's call it $5500 Correction: $8114 (so far). It was initially $3800 to get rolling, but has suffered upgrades and repairs over the course of it's life
Distance: 1912km
# Rides: 130
Cost per ride: $42 $62.4

Previous Bike (still occasional use): Santa Cruz Blur TRc
Cost: About $4k over it's life
# Rides: 105
Cost per ride: $38

The Banshee will be my main steed for a while yet, so I reckon it'll push under the Blur. For the fun it gives me vs. what I'd have to pay to have that level of fun somewhere else, it's a bargain.

And finally, the commuter:
Cost: $3k? It was around there at least $6933
# Rides: 447
Cost per ride: $6.7 $15.5

The goal here is to get that cheaper than a train, at $4.11. Another few thousand km ought to do it.
It's so much worse than I thought. I went back and did up a spreadsheet of all my orders, that was a bad idea. That cost includes all the repairs & upgrades along the way too (including fuckups like buying the wrong brake rotors), so should be pretty close to the mark now.
 

Jim Junkie

Used to sell drugs, now he just takes them
The sadder part is how good we had it pre-geoblocking. Full trans/brake gruppos fo $500 odd, xt brakes for $200 a set, $30 cassettes, clearance frames for few hundreds.
Tell me about it. I built the commuter after geoblocking hit. The pretty standard groupset I wanted to get for the commuter (Shimano GRX) was absolutely nowhere to be found, both bricks & mortar and online. I eventually had to go fleabay straight from Taiwan just to get the bike built.

It's hard to separate geoblocking from all the other price increases going on though, which I've noticed are just going up in general over the last 3 years:
XT Groupset: Up nearly 50% ($430 to $590)
Rims: Up 70% for the same thing ($139 to $230 each)
Frame: Nearly 80% more expensive ($2099 to $3755)
Tires: Up 30% ($75 to $99)

Hell, the XT cassette I bought in 2017 cost me $52, and it was $65 in late 2018 when I got another. The last one I bought cost me nearly $200.

Those are all if you can even find them in stock, which for Shimano is increasingly difficult. You can blame COVID for some of it, but Shimano stock has been difficult to find since before then as well.
Yeah, there's some technology movement there - That's a V2 vs a V3 Banshee and 1x11 vs 1x12 Shimano XT groupsets, but they are both current (or very nearly so) at the time.

Standard things though - like custom cut spokes and standard bearings for the frame have seen some uplift but nothing beyond the ordinary inflation.

The long & short of it is that if I were building a bike now, building the comparable Spitfire to what I made in 2018 becomes a very expensive and lot less affordable exercise.

/Rant
 
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