from the TORONTO STAR (Newspaper)
Are cars better than bikes?
There are a lot of good reasons to ride a bicycle and every one should be able to choose their own personal reason - ride for recreation, ride for health, ride because you can't afford car insurance and gas. However, conservation and developing a more sustained, personal energy supply are very significant issues.
Cars are a Significant Source of Pollution:
Motor vehicles emissions represent 31% of total carbon dioxide, 81% of carbon monoxide and 49% of nitrogen oxides released in the U.S. (The Clean Air Council). A short, four-mile round trip by bicycle keeps about 15 pounds of pollutants out of the air we breathe (WorldWatch Institute).
Half of all Americans believe that cars, SUVs, pickups, and vans are the primary cause of air pollution in their communities and 65% are concerned about the level of traffic congestion on the roads in their communities. They’re right -- Americans spend on average 75 minutes a day in their car (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, October 2000 Omnibus Household Survey).
Americans Want to Bike More and Drive Less:
Americans want to have the opportunity to bike to work instead of driving, with 40% of those surveyed saying they would commute by bike if safe facilities were available (survey by Rodale, publisher of Bicycle Magazine).
More than one-third (38%) of all Americans feel that the availability of bikeways, walking paths, and sidewalks for getting to work, shopping, and recreation is very important in choosing where to live (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, October 2000 Omnibus Household Survey).
20% of Americans used a bicycle for transportation in the 30 days measured in the Census Bureau Household Survey. Bicycling is the second most preferred form of transportation after the automobile, ahead of public transportation, with 22.3% of those who bicycled did so more than ten of the 30 days (Bureau of Transportation Statistics, October 2000 Omnibus Household Survey).
Cycling Can Make a Significant Difference:
25% of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40% of all trips are within two miles of the home, and 50% of the working population commutes five miles or less to work (Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey), distances easily and quickly commutable by bicycle, yet more than 82% of trips five miles or less are made by personal motor vehicle.
60% of the pollution created by automobile emissions happens in the first few minutes of operation, before pollution control devices can work effectively. Since "cold starts" create high levels of emissions, shorter car trips are more polluting on a per-mile basis than longer trips.
In the past year, more bicycles than cars have been sold in the US. That hasn't happened since the 1973 oil crisis! "Bicycle sales are near an all-time high with 19 million sold last year [worth five to six billion dollars] -- close to the 20 million sold during the oil embargo in the early 1970s," said Tim Blumenthal, executive director of Bikes Belong, an association based in Boulder, Colorado. "Some 87 million people [in the US] have climbed on a bike in the past 12 months," he adds. ::Bicycle sales boom in US amid rising gas prices,
Last year, in Australia, bicycles outsold cars by 30%. And have outsold cars for the past 5 years. But the majority of sales have been for recreational use, not for commuting or day-to-day transport. Since 1997 bicycle sales have increase about 90%. All according to BikeOz News.
In a working paper entitled “The Environmental Paradox of Bicycling”, Karl Ulrich at the University of Pennslyvania reports that shifting people from their cars to bicycles offers almost no benefit to the environment.
Bicycles do have large first-order environmental benefits over cars as a means of transportation. Ulrich’s analysis considers the case in which a formerly sedentary person begins bicycling 10 km per day, 5 days per week. In this scenario, about one ton of CO2 is spared every year in the form of reduced fuel consumption.
This reduction in fuel use is partially offset by the increased food consumption of a cyclist. Although typically we think of food as carbon neutral — because the plants at the bottom of our food chain regrow after we harvest them — this view overlooks the fact that most of us don’t feed ourselves by hunting and gathering. The energy required to grow, harvest, process, package, and transport food to your nearest Whole Foods significantly outweighs the actual caloric content of your meal, by a factor of almost six. In other words, only about 15% of the energy we consume when we eat is actually in our food. The rest is contained in the fossil fuels used to bring our food to us.
But increased food consumption is a relatively minor effect when compared to the overall gas savings of cycling over driving. The real culprit in Ulrich’s analysis is the increased lifespan of people who ride bikes. Regular exercise helps you live longer, which points to an unsettling fact. One of the single best things you can do for the planet is to limit your time here.
Car Boom can puts countries on the road to a smoggy future.
Cars consume 50 times more oxygen than cyclists per unit distance covered, producing carbon dioxide at a similar ratio. They also have a greater cooling problem, since they explode their fuel combined with air at 2000-2250 [degrees] C,[2] which is over one third of the surface temperature of the sun (6000 [degrees] C).[3] Cyclists operate at only 37 [degrees] C, and from the standpoint of physics are not heat engines but constant temperature energy converters more analogous to fuel cells.[4] But we, too, have to keep cool, and our main system of heat dispersal takes up no extra space and is functionally--if not always socially--most elegant. In short, we evaporate. A London surgeon visiting a patient at Claridge's was delicately reminded of this by the splendidly uniformed man on the hotel door, who said as he took his bicycle: "I'll just walk her up and down a bit until she stops sweating, sir" (J H Lees Ferguson, personal communication).
Certainly large groups of cyclists are blocking motor vehicle traffic. BAD!!
The WTO Gives Bicycles a Push
One of the myths about cars use is that auto dependency is simply an expression of the free market: in fact, automobile use is highly subsidized. As Todd Litman of the Victoria Transport Policy Institute points out, in order to move to sustainable transportation, market reforms are necessary to redress these subsidies.
A good example of this concerns bicycles: even though bicyclists pay their taxes to support road repairs just like car drivers do, they are generally considered second-class users on most north american city streets. And as affordable as they already are when compared to cars, bicycles have simply not been able to compete with cars in the public eye. This is spite of being the most energy-efficient form of transportation ever devised, and the leading "sustainable wonder of the world."
There are signs that this economic imbalance may be changing. Bicycles are now being recognized for their advantages by one the highest economic authorities on Earth: The World Trade Organization is opening discussions on classifying bicyles as an "environmental good" free from tariffs.
One guys says:
We own a car, and we drive it. They’re absolutely the quickest way to get most places. Even though there’s plenty of public transportation here in the Bay Area, there are still plenty of trips that are quicker by car. There are days when I’m tired or in a rush and would *love* to be driving to work rather than doing the walk-BART-walk thing, or biking. I could cut my daily commute from 30-40 minutes each way down to 15-20 minutes (but then I wouldn’t get to enjoy my podcasts, and would lose my only remaining lifeline to excercise).
In Africa, Burundi:
There is not a lot of traffic on the streets, and there are no traffic lights. There is accordingly little air pollution, which is a great relief. However, roads are in poor repair.
If you cycle to Beijing –you need lots of time and food! Cars are just convienent, fast, safe and mobility is much higher than bikes.
Cars are more efficient, cheaper, smaller and more environment friendly. Hybrid-cars are even better.
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