Continuing to flip through a cycling magazine’s yearly buyer’s guide, my eyes bugged at the World’s Most Expensive Bike.

But what really caught my attention was the number of bikes closing in on — or surpassing — the five-figure mark.

It reminded me of an ad I saw a couple of years back. I don’t remember what it was trying to sell, but it featured a beautiful, sparkling bike mounted on the roof rack of a total beater car.

The implication, of course, was that any serious cyclist would put more cash in his two-wheeled ride than his four-wheeled one.

Back to the buyer’s guide: There were 51 complete road bikes featured. I ignored the frame-only prices, as well as the women’s bikes and mountain bikes.

Of the 51 complete road bikes, 27 cost $5,700 or more. Why $5,700? That’s the blue-book value of my car.

Now, I know there are some pricey bikes out there, and I know a glossy buyer’s guide like the one I was checking out is going to feature only the best and brightest (and, by extension, most expensive) bikes being made.

And my car’s nothing special.

It’s a 13-year-old, mid-size, foreign-born sports-utility vehicle. LOW MILES! SUPER CLEAN! LOCAL OWNER! MAKE AN OFFER.

And it is, gloriously, paid for.

None of my bikes is 13 years old, and none has the 110,000 miles that my car has.

So to compare relative cost, I decided to compare price-per-mile stats of a couple of my bikes to my car.

First, the car.

My Pathfinder has 110,000 miles on it, as, as best I can recollect, I dropped about $15,000 on it when I bought it back in 2000. Back then, it had about 40,000 miles on it. So I paid 15 large to drive it 70,000 miles. That’s not figuring gas or tires or oil changes, just a straight-up price-per-mile figure of … 21 cents per mile.

Next up, my oldest recreational road bike. I bought it for $1,200 a few years ago. I just checked the computer and it reads just over 13,000 miles. So again I commence to ciphering and figure it cost just over 9 cents per mile. What a bargain.

Some of my newer (hence, less well traveled) bikes would cost more, of course.

And then there’s my workhorse commuter. The battery ran out on the computer years ago, and I never replaced it. But I’m confident I’ve put more than 20,000 miles on it, and I bought it for a bargain-basement price of $475. The resultant price-per-mile: a whopping 2 cents per mile.

Again, I didn’t figure in any operational costs. If I had, the bikes would prove to be an even better buy, I’m sure.

Still, I’m not sure even I can rationalize spending cost-of-a-car money on a bike.

Unless I ride it a long, long way.