Beating the commute: A non-empirical study of what's faster during my daily commute

This is a lesson in transportation during Rush Hour, in San Diego California, specifically  when it comes to getting to UCSD on a two wheeled vehicle.

Subject vehicles are as follows,

Vehicle 1) a Trek 3700 mountain bike, modified and powered with a Bafang BBS01 750 watt, 48volt mid drive motor system. Read about this bike build here.

Vehicle 2) a 2003 Suzuki Burgman 650cc motorcycle. Sure it looks like a scooter, but it's a powerhouse that wants to go 90MPH everywhere, and has a stated top speed of 110MPH

The Burger is a sport bike in sheep's clothing, running a watercooled 638cc fuel injected inline twin engine with an electronic CVT (SECVT)transmission which offers seamless automatic "Gear changing"(Really, ratios).  The engine produces 55 horsepower. The bike is really a touring/commuter dream bike with ample fairings to keep wind, bugs, debris, and splashing off the rider, and has a massive under-seat trunk box that will hold 6 bags of groceries or 2 full face helmets with room to spare, and totals 56 liters of storage. If you select "sport mode", you will make Harley riders look like slugs, and can best most sport bikes of similar size, and even smoke 1000cc sportbikes in the first 50 meters at any traffic light, due to the CVT system being designed to not lift the front wheel off the pavement.

The E-bike "Lance" is a kind of a franken-bike i built myself. It is an aluminum hard tail mountain bike with a Rockshox front end, and Maxxis Hookworm 2.5" slick road tires.

It runs a Bafang BBS02 Mid-drive motor at 48volts and 750 watts for 1 entire horsepower. I power it with a Panasonic 18650 LiFePo battery pack at 11.7 Amp-hours and 52 volts. The bike weighs 52 pounds and is running a 58 tooth front chainring, a 13-34 '7 speed' rear cassette and has a top speed peddling of 28MPH. On downhills I commonly will exceed 40MPH just coasting though. You can read about my build here, and here. To date, I have put 2800 miles on this bike since January 1, 2017, with no electrical issues whatsoever. I additionally built out a solar array and charging system for the bike, and the bike gets plugged into the sun daily

Study methods:

I compared 1 month of riding data from Strava to come up with an average trip time on the bicycle. I made a fancy graphing spreadsheet that showed me that over the 4 weeks I have been riding my new 8.9 mile(18 miles, RT)  1 way commute, I averaged 28 minutes and 22 seconds. I used 40 data points to find this number of 28 minutes.

I also timed 6 rides to and from work using a stopwatch on my cellphone, via the Burgermeister. These timed entries averaged out to 39 minutes and 12 seconds.

Conclusions:

The numbers do not lie. on "Low traffic" summer days, I am beating the motorcycle by an average of 10 minutes per trip, or 20 minutes per day, by peddling the vastly underpowered bicycle. Why? you may ask?

1. I do not need to get on the freeway, which is a parking lot.

2. I can "run" a few stop signs on the bicycle, but cannot on the Burger.

3. I am able to use a dedicated bike lane and that gets me out in front of motor traffic at every stoplight

4. I am able to run a 5 mile segregated bike path through Rose canyon, and that saves a lot of time that would alternatively either be spent putting along the freeway, or dealing with traffic and traffic lights on a main 4 lane city street.

In conclusion, The Burgman is a great motorcycle for those days I have errands to run, but does not beat a bike for my commute, and the bike is better for me in many ways, including adding an hour of cardio to my daily life, the wonderful silence to think it provides, and the accomplished feeling I get from traveling via human and solar power. Also, powering the bike costs nothing, so what, a million miles per gallon? Whereas, the Burger gets 60MPG.

All imagery by @dawg-boy

Imagery via iPhone8.

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