This was posted on 2023-04-30
Back in early 2022 when Sri Lanka was at the peak of economic turmoil and fuel stocks in the country were dwindling, people started to rely on bicycles to get to and from work. But this was not new to me. I used to cycle to work since my first job at Renuka Agri Foods in 2015. In fact I used to cycle to school since I was in Grade 12 which was the first grade of GCE A/L.
I had many bicycles in my past and my most trusted bicycle was a gray Raleigh that I got while working for Renuka. But after trusting on my Raleigh bike to work flawlessly for many, many years, it suddenly broke down close to the peak period where the Sri Lankan rupee was declining against the US dollar. It happened that the thread on the hub of my back wheel had snapped and the freewheel was not held in place. The freewheel was able to rotate both forwards and backwards without any grip on the wheel. Thankfully for me this happened suddenly while I was riding to pick up food from a restaurant close to my house.
There was no chance to repair the bike since all parts were out of stock in the entire country. Mostly due to many people had already started taking out their old bikes out of storage and repairing them to go to work and on top of that imports have been restricted in Sri Lanka to retain the available US dollar reserves.
I had no choice but to purchase a new bicycle. But when should I do it. The prices of bikes were going up steeply as virtually everyone across the country is purchasing a bike. I looked up a few good & cheap recommendations and came across a brand called Fantom from India which was pushed by one of the reputed bike shops in my area. Sri Lanka was able to have an arrangement with India to trade without US dollars so lot of Indian products were still flowing in to the country. But the prices in Sri Lankan rupees was not cheap or even close to match the converted value in Indian rupees at all.
But I didn’t have a choice. On day 1 when I checked the price was LKR 80,000. When I checked about 3 days later, it had jumped to LKR 95,000. At this point I wanted to buy it before the prices went up any further. The guy on the phone said that the next batch of bikes coming in next week would sell for LKR 115,000. I found the exact same bike being sold at another place for LKR 105,000 and I immediately bought it not knowing that about a week or two later the prices stabilized.
Fine. Let’s do the math’s. If I continue on this bike to work my savings against the fuel I would have spent to get to work by car would have paid back the bike in a few months. At the time it costed me approximately LKR 5,000 per 2 weeks to move around in my car. But since this also included by other movements in the car, I calculated assuming my car will do an average of 12km/l back and forth from work which is about 13km away. This means that taking the fuel cost of LKR 184 at that time it would have taken me 132 weeks of cycling to work 4 days / week. This means by July in 2024 I would have completely paid back the bicycle. But with rapidly spiking fuel prices the value would have been paid back in 69 weeks which is when I am writing this article.
So what has happened so far?
I was not able to keep up the same expected routine as planned. Cycling 4 days a week was not a problem. However, with a change in job in June 2022 I was required to travel abroad every now and then, where each time I travel I would be gone close to a month. Having travelled 3 times till today, I have lost approximately 3.5 months including the gradual increase in cycling frequency having not been cycling for 1 month. I have also met with a few non-cycling related accidents which put me off cycling again for about a month or two. All in all this would only be a delay in my payback.
But since I purchased the bicycle, it was starting to make gradually increasing noises including the fact that my back wheel was rocking side to side. I serviced the bike using the seller and the sound temporarily went away. Having thought the service of the seller was not good I gave it to another reputed repair shop which highlighted to me that the bike came with a inherent design problem. Having only cycled about 100km till then the bike had already experience significant wear and tare on the bike chain. They repaired and serviced my bike assuring it will run for a number of months. However about another few km later I noticed that the back wheel was rocking about again. Now going to the 3rd service who highlighted to be that the hub of the back wheel was bent. This took another significant repair and I was back on the road. But the problems never stopped. The bicycle started to give out so many problems that the bike at this point was mostly parked at home.
At this point I decided to call it quits on the challenge. I was sinking too much money in to the bike and was adding up to the cost of the bike faster than it was paying back.
