Ticket or Ride

Let’s imagine you still have to go into work, whatever the current Covid status. Many people do: care workers, cleaners, retail staff, frontline key workers of all descriptions.

If you’re on the minimum wage, the cost of that journey is a very large part of your ‘how do I make ends meet?’ calculations.

Quite often, whether you’ve found a job cleaning trams or stacking Christmas puddings in a supermarket, your accommodation won’t be just round the corner. And if you can’t afford a car (a third of South Yorkshire households are carless) you’ll have to weigh up the cost of public transport.

A monthly ticket will knock you back £54 if you restrict yourself to one bus company in Sheffield, £65 if you need to use several bus operators and the tram, or £88 if you need to cross into Rotherham, Barnsley or Doncaster.

Mechanic explaining problems to a bike commuter

We know what you’re thinking: why not use the Cycle to Work scheme? Instead of paying £54 (or more) for a boring bus journey, you could ask your employer for a really nice £800 bike, £100 worth of kit and end up paying £51 a month instead, and after a year, nothing! A no-brainer, surely?

Except, like many care workers, cleaners, and retail staff, you can’t.

That’s because you can only get the the advertised 25-39% discounts of the Cycle to Work scheme if you earn more than the minimum wage. The low paid are effectively excluded from a national scheme that allows someone on a salary of £50,000 to save £2,500 on the cost of the Pinarello road bike they’ve picked up to nip in to the office for a sales meeting.

Many low paid workers have made those calculations about bus tickets and bikes in Sheffield, and fully understand the health and environmental benefits of cycling to work, just like everyone else. But they can’t access that handy discount many of us get for ouir commuter bikes, so they usually get something cheap, which is hard to ride, and breaks down all the time. And then maybe they’ll just go back to paying 20% of their monthly income on a bus ticket.

We think it’s time for some levelling up in cycle commuting too.

Is Time On Your Side?

How would you feel about a calm Christmas and a peaceful New Year?

Here at Russell’s Bicycle Shed, we’ve been thinking a lot about how time, hassle, and stress are related over the last year. We’ve been working flat out to keep the city moving through the twists and turns of the Pandemic, and we know thousands of other key workers have too. (And hats off to them all).

Woman fixing a bike

If you work for a living, you can calculate how much your time fixing up your commuter bike is worth. And how much time you save for your employer by riding in to work rather than waiting in a queue for half your commute. And evidence shows that cycle commuters are more alert and ready to get started once they arrive, unlike stressed out rush hour drivers. That’s more productive time for your employer, in addition to the fewer days off sick you take because you ride a bike.

We’d like to spend more of our time talking to friends and customers about how the city can come out of all this as a better place for cyclists, with better active travel routes like Grey to Green, and more enlightened employers providing secure parking and other essentials for the commuters who save them time and money by riding to work.

But we’re often too busy replacing hundreds of rusted chains and worn out wheelsets.

We want to keep the city (and you) moving, and we’ve seen how much stress is involved when you decide to ride to work one Spring day only to discover the bike you last used in October has seized up. Or how it feels to miss an important meeting one morning because a wheel rim or a tyre fails halfway there.

So, there’s the setup, here’s the sell: if you and your family cyclists love playing with oil, grease and spanners, read no more.

But if you’d rather spend your time watching a film with your partner of an evening, or meeting your mates at the weekend instead of spending the afternoon trying to make your gears work, ask yourself, how much is that time worth? More than £11 a month?

That’s how much it costs to join our Club, with the two annual services, emergency fixes and free loan bike required to keep you moving, without hassle or stress.

And when everyone is saying ‘buy less stuff to help the climate’, and ‘spend more time on yourself and your loved ones’, maybe spending some festive funds to have a peaceful, hassle and grease free New Year is worth thinking about. Yes? Join the Club.