Predicting the Big Day

Schwalbe Fat Frank 29 x 2.0, a photo by bendertj on Flickr.

Predicting when the 300,000 mile roll-over will happen, and determining when to begin documenting the final miles has turned out to be somewhat challenging. Over on the right-hand side of the blog I've added a widget that shows real-time mileage and an estimated roll-over date that are calculated based on daily mileage updates I add manually to a Google Spreadsheet.

The roll-over date is based on a linear growth model that takes the average miles per day traveled and calculates out how many days remain until the car reaches 300k. Right now it's showing a targeted roll-over date of March 2013. On top of having a small sample size I've been bicycle commuting to work more frequently and my wife and I are driving her car more on the weekend because we want to delay the inevitable replacement of this vehicle as much as possible. So posting will be sparse until later this fall.

In the meantime, here's a picture of one of my 2 bicycles. It's a Surly CrossCheck purchased back in 2008. It has served me well in the past for commuting to work, lite single track duty, touring, and most recently cyclocross racing. I'm currently building it up as a city bike and backup / nice weather commuter with Schwalbe Fat Frank balloon tires and platform pedals. My primary bike, a Surly Long Haul Trucker, will probably be featured in another post in the future.

Bike commuting is great. It eliminates the greatest expense to driving a car - gasoline. Although when you take gasoline out of the equation, I've probably spent more money on bicycle tires alone in the past 5 years than I have on car maintenance.