[wizzo227]

When comparing purchase and recharge costs of various vehicles and electrics, don't forget to assess whether a bicycle could get you there. Even two days a week by bike is certainly going to save you money (and gym membership fees) if your usual journey(s) fit with what a bike or e-bike does best.

Here is my rule of thumb (any comments?)
<1 mile : walk
1 to 7 miles : bicycle
3 to 10 miles : electric assist bicycle
> 10 miles : cycle or bus to the railway station

Too many people use their personal motorwaycar by default, even for walkably short journeys, and then have to leave it parked somewhere for most of the time.
Most people are not accustomed to road safety vigilence at 10 to 20 mph, and are not training their children for that either.

To get some idea of how much money you should need instead of fuel costs or electric recharge costs, my electric bike uses about
0.9 kWh/100 km,
or about 70 miles/kWh,
which is 33.5 pence at the EoN summer 2023 price,
so better than 2 miles per penny.

And that is if you are paying for recharge. You might find it convenient to keep the charger, which uses 0.08kW, at work, and take the removable e-bike battery inside to charge it. I work from home, so I mostly charge mine for free, thanks to rooftop solar photovoltaics.

[DebF_EONNext]

This is a really interesting thread @wizzo227.

I live in the middle of no where, to give you a better idea, my closest big supermarket is 18 miles in one direction or 24 miles in the other (I don't fancy a 36 or 48 mile round trip, on a bike, on 60mph winding country roads with the shopping 😆) so for the weekly shop etc I need to use a car no way around it unfortunately.

Rule of thumb for my household is under 3 miles it's walked or cycled (although it's only really my Husband that cycles anywhere) anything over 3 is usually by car and that is generally because we are going quite a distance. Incidentally there is an elderly gent who lives in the next village (around 5 miles) he has a workshop in our village, apparently he has cycled from his village to the workshop everyday for the past 30 years (sometimes in the rain/snow) now that is dedication!

[wizzo227]

Why on earth Should you drive 36 or 48 miles just for your groceries?

Deb, this won't effect you this year because big 20th century style private personal motoring is still in fashion, and entrapment in the aisles of a big shop is still in fashion.

The shop could have defined their prices to normally include delivery by a shared all-electric delivery van, which might go as slowly as a 20th century British milk float in order to go at the best-efficiency speed of electrics; below 30mph, and that does the drive for you. Because it is shared with the other houses it need not cost much per house to drop routine deliveries once per week at most of them. With the other shop scheduling helpfully, you'd get two food drops per week. With 21st century online shopping, you can choose by online picture any packaged food from the warehouse, plus download for your whole shopping list the nutrition and mineral stats summed for your whole purchase, various scope CO2 emmisions and other information, and you can easily check whether you've gone over your target for household CO_2e from food shopping. If you haven't, then you might want to choose to add a treat like chocolate cake or a beef joint. Whilst there are still a few fresh goods which are best hand picked in person, every single fresh item in my local Lidl including the fresh bread has been photographed for the till. That is, if I can buy it in person at a Lidl shop then I could see a picture just like that item on the internet from home.

Here is the real wizzo227 original :
The cost per mile of owning and running a large private motor vehicle which is parked or idle for as much of the time as usual, should be more than enough to buy and use your small personal transport and to also buy and use your share of the shop delivery infrastructure instead.
Next gain: suppose that both supermarkets no longer need three quarters of their car parks. What might be the land value of all that space, levelled and near to a shop, connected to a road drains and electrics, and what would you want built on 3/4 of a supermarket car park ?
Next gain: embedded CO2 of building your small personal transport and your share of the shop delivery EV should be much less than the embedded CO2 of a private personal motorwaycar.
Next gain: the sites 18 and 24 miles away need not space out and light shelves for maximum cross-selling distraction since you are not there. Input is pallets from the warehouse and output is household weekly, for which one two or three Standard boxes should suffice. Design for best efficiency least shelf space traverse by pickers sees less frequently bought item numbers further away from the most used areas, and some of the most popular items such as bread milk and potatoes can get amazon style xyz pickers to conveyor belt to an order assembly carousel. Imagine the baggage collection conveyer at the airport, and with lots of standard boxes going around on it, into which conveyer belts from pickers drop the right goods.
Ten minutes of operation of that picker assembler might load your box with goods which used to take you half an hour of trolley-pushing to go around collecting.
Next gain: Shop heating and lighting are no longer going to effect the mood of the shopper. Cooling like at the distribution centre might be better for food freshness.

Can anyone think of more advantages and disadvantages of ceasing to self-pick and self-deliver most of the routine food used at home ?

[retrotecchie]

I drive that sort of distance for my groceries because that's how far my round trip is to the nearest reasonable supermarket. It's three miles and a a thousand feet of elevation drop to my nearest bus stop and the return trip on the bus costs more than the fuel I use for the car. The car journey takes me 40 minutes each way and the bus takes an hour, plus the walking time to the bus stop each way.

I could use the Co-Op which is only a twenty mile round trip, but the total cost of the groceries there more than wipe out any savings on fuel.

Of course, I make every fuel mile count, so I also collect my prescriptions, have lunch in town and visit friends while I'm about it.

For those of us in very rural communities, well off the beaten track, not served very well by public transport or any real 'infrastructure', the private car is the only viable option. But if you have to use one as I do, use it as efficiently and as little as is humanly possible. I don't make any 'non essential' journeys if I can possibly avoid it.