At the end of 2023, several people I follow on LinkedIn and other social media sites published posts recapping their year of transit trips. “That’s fun,” I thought, “but I feel like I ride my bike enough that reporting the number of times I took transit this year doesn’t tell the full story.”
Thus, entering 2024, I decided to track every trip I took across all modes.
I live in Minneapolis, and I primarily use some combination of biking, transit and walking to get around the Twin Cities; I semi-regularly need to drive for work; and, on rare occasion, I’ll drive for personal errands. I am most commonly in a car when heading out of town, and, while I try to limit my flying and use rail when I do travel farther from home, I had a work and a family commitment that each required air travel this year.
With these considerations, I decided to track my mileage and time spent with the following modes:
- Biking. I excluded purely recreational rides, but kept mileage where I could’ve driven to a group ride but biked instead, or participated in activities where I theoretically could have used another mode, such as a bike-based brewery crawl that I organized in March.
- Transit. Pretty self-explanatory.
- Walking. This included walking to the light rail station or bus stop, walking for a transfer and walking to my final destination but did not account for things like the walk into a box store from the parking lot.
- Driving (personal). I included any time I drove to something like a medical appointment in the suburbs or to pick up an item I couldn’t carry on my bike or the bus, plus any trips where my partner and I drove together despite other modes being available.
- Driving (work). This counted any time I had to drive for a field visit or other off-site work commitment.
- Driving (vacation). I was least sure about the best way to count this, but landed on counting any trip where we drove for time away even if we were carpooling with other friends in our car or theirs, just to get a full picture of how vacation factored into my miles traveled.
- Carpool. I only categorized a trip as carpool if it was within the metro and I drove or rode with someone who’s not in my household.
- Flying (vacation). I don’t like to fly for environmental reasons (and because it’s just not that pleasant), but sometimes you have somewhere you have to go and not enough vacation time to take the train there.
- Flying (work). Same as above.
- Rail. Amtrak was my best option a few times (yay!).
As shown in the excerpt below, I added each trip to a spreadsheet that included the date, trip purpose, mode, distance and time. I wanted to track the purpose so that I could confirm which trips I logged and be sure I captured everything. This is probably not the most tech-savvy or efficient way to record this information, but as a spreadsheet lover who also keeps track of work and personal tasks in similar formats, I found it was fine for me.
In the final chart (shown below), I was not surprised to see that biking was my most-used mode for transportation in my daily life with 2,259 miles, followed by transit with about half as many miles (1,087). The mileage was halved again for driving (401) when biking or riding the bus wasn’t feasible, like bringing my cat to the vet (I fear he’s too big for a backpack, and the bus is just inconvenient enough to be a non-option). I was also not surprised that I logged by far the most miles in driving for vacation.
When I told my partner that I wanted to track my mileage at the start of the year, he suggested that I also record the time spent for each trip. I’m glad he did; the results look very different for hours spent on each mode than for distance traveled. Although my two flying trips comprised just 3% of my travel time throughout the year, including the 90 minutes of airport time for each, they account for more than one-third (36%) of my total mileage for the year.
On the flip side, biking comprised 36% of my time and only 16% of my miles, and walking took 10% of my travel time but comprised only 1% of my mileage. Driving for vacation fell in the middle with one-quarter of my time and nearly half (47%) of my miles, which makes sense, because it’s much slower than flying and much faster than biking or transit.
The monthly breakdown shows how my travel patterns change throughout the year. I’ve included one chart without vacation and one with, because the latter really throws off the scale. My personal driving miles are high in January because I was shuttling back and forth for a move and making frequent new-homeowner trips to Home Depot; in May, for a single trip to an appointment in Woodbury; in July, for picking up furniture purchased via Facebook as well as, ironically, an unsuccessful attempt to sell my car to Morrie’s Mazda; and in December, for a visit to the Woodbury Costco pharmacy. Transit usage stays pretty consistent each month, as I often ride the Blue Line to work, and I’ll use some combo of transit and biking for a variety of other trips.
The consistent presence of vacation miles from April through October reflects our busy warm-weather schedule of camping, cabin trips and bike events throughout Minnesota and Wisconsin (if only we had better transit access to outdoor recreation!). The big spike in June is the result of a trip my partner and I took to Chattanooga for a family reunion.
I feel a little environmentalist guilt for all the vacation driving miles, but reassure myself knowing that my 6,994 non-work driving miles are just over half the average annual miles by driver for women ages 20-34 (12,004) and less than half the average for my age group overall (15,291), as of 2022. Additionally, a significant portion of my miles were logged when carpooling with at least one other household, when we could have easily driven separately for our trips.
You can see that biking is my preferred mode for getting around town, though my mileage dips in April and in June due to week-long trips out of state. Bike miles remained relatively low in July and into August as I got COVID, stayed home and took a few weeks off biking to allow myself time for a full recovery. Later in August, we became a one-car household when I successfully sold my car (yay!) and used the proceeds to buy a Tern HSD e-bike. From there, my bike miles increased again in September and October as I used the e-bike for trips where I might otherwise have taken transit or resorted to driving. I also biked less in November because of some out-of-state travel (more on that in a moment) and in December because, frankly, I didn’t really go anywhere for the last 10 days of the month.
To skew the graph even further: my monthly trips, with flying and rail included. I flew to Portland, Oregon, in late April for a professional conference and arrived a few days early so I could spend time with a friend in the area. I still counted the flight as work travel because I would’ve flown to Portland with or without the personal part of the trip, but the little driving tour of waterfalls in the Columbia River Gorge counted toward vacation driving. The conference ended on May 3, and I flew back then, which is why that charcoal gray part of the chart is a weird rhombus-type shape spanning two months, instead of a distinct peak in a single month like the vacation flight miles.
In September, I had the joy of attending a college friend’s wedding in Chicago and the bonus of taking the new-ish Borealis train to get there. It was a full train both ways. While I would’ve loved to have a seat to myself to spread out a bit, I’m delighted that it’s proven to be so popular. We faced some delays heading back to the Twin Cities, but, on the whole, it was a lovely experience. I’d recommend it to anyone traveling to Chicago, Milwaukee or any of the smaller cities along the route.
I headed to the West Coast a second time in November, this time with my younger sister, to watch our older sister represent New Zealand in the master women’s division of the World Ultimate Frisbee Championship in Irvine, California (recommended, the athleticism is so impressive!). Despite my feelings about flying, supporting my loved ones is more important to me. Orange County is a beautiful area that doesn’t get to live up to its potential because of urban sprawl and horrifyingly ubiquitous freeways and stroads that you have to use to get just about anywhere.
The 30-minute drive between our Airbnb and the tournament venue would have taken an hour on transit and another two hours of walking, and there were several places where we had to get on the interstate, drive a mile or two, exit the interstate to turn around and get back on the highway, then exit again, just to get to a destination less than half a mile from our starting point as the crow flies. This meant we racked up more than 400 miles of driving in just one week of “normal” transportation around the metro area. I got a brief reprieve when I stuck around Irvine to watch one last Frisbee match while my younger sister returned to LA for some tourism activities, then took the Amtrak’s Pacific Surfliner and the LA Metro to rejoin her for dinner before we flew out the following morning.
(In light of the wildfires currently affecting Southern California, I want to be clear I’m not blaming the people who live there for the poor infrastructure, but rather the systemic prioritization of cars that has harmed our communities and the climate for the past several decades.)
Money Saved, Value Added
I did some back-of-the-napkin math to see what kind of financial benefit I achieved by opting out of driving where possible. Using the federal reimbursement rate of 67 cents per mile in 2024, and 3,506 miles traveled via bike, transit or walking, I saved about $2,349.25 on fuel and car maintenance costs. This, of course, fails to account for the savings achieved with carpooling for vacation, or the various and significant externalities of car use that are very much not reflected in the sticker cost of gas, insurance, registration and other fees.
It also doesn’t capture the intangible value added to my life through the joys of riding a bike, the quiet luxury of relaxing while a professional operator gets me safely where I need to go and the intimate knowledge of the city that can only be attained by navigating it on foot, but that’s a topic for another post.
All in all, I really enjoyed tracking all of my trips throughout the year. I’m planning to continue the project through 2025, and I’m excited to see if any changes result in my first full year of owning an e-bike and sharing one car in a two-person household.
