There has never been a tax deduction for commuting expenses, regardless of whether a person is a W-2 employee or self-employed.
Previously, the tax law allowed employers to provide employees with free or discounted parking without having to include the value of the parking as part of their wages. (Normally, everything of value that is provided to an employee as compensation for services must be counted as taxable income, unless it qualifies as one of the specific types of non-taxable fringe benefits under the tax code.) subsequently, the law was modified to allow employers to provide free or discounted mass transit passes to their employees without cars, without having to count it as taxable income. These provisions were modified or eliminated as part of 2018 tax reform (I forget which). But even these provisions when they existed did not create a tax deduction for W-2 employees’ commuting expenses – it only created the ability for the employer to provide a tax free benefit, if the employer chose to do so.
If you are a W-2 employee, your commuting expenses are not deductible. Your transportation expenses during your workday are no longer deductible at the federal level but may be deductible at a state level. You could only deduct your actual expenses related to transportation during the workday, not your trips to work from home and back again. You would have to have some reasonable way of allocating your bicycle maintenance expenses between non-deductible commuting and possibly deductible work day transportation.
If you are self-employed and file a schedule C, and you use a bicycle for workday transportation that is an ordinary and necessary business expense for the type of work you do, then you can list the bicycle as an asset and depreciate it, and you can list your maintenance expenses as general business expenses. However, if the bicycle is also an item of personal property used for pleasure or recreation, you must again allocate the percentage of ownership and allocate the percentage of maintenance expenses based on your percentage of business use, and, if you are audited, the IRS will want to see some kind of records or other reasonable basis for making that allocation.
