Information and Incentives to get out there and live life

• 18 - A reduced risk for heart disease
• 17 - Bridges and tunnels which are less intrusive
• 16 - Nice views (no not that view)
• 15 - Roads with fewer potholes
• 14 - Trees along the road rather than guardrails
• 13 - Walkable communities offer reduced travel distances
• 12 - Less pollution means reductions of asthma & cancer
• 11 - Less time in traffic means more time for leisure and family
• 10 - No more road kill
• 09 - More opportunities to say ' hello ' to friends
• 08 - The $90 billion currently spent on motorways can go to our public schools and libraries
• 07 - More space for playgrounds
• 06 - The end of tow trucks
• 05 - The elimination of road rage
• 04 - Greatly reduced noise levels
• 03 - pizza tastes better than oil
• 02 - The opportunity to breathe clean air, not car exhaust
• 01 - Watching an eagle take flight on your morning commute
  (a true story told to me by a Portland bike commuter)

There are many experiences in life which are impossible to understand, or appreciate from the experience of the standard western lifestyle. A great speaker gave the analogy of a mango. I can tell you about the mango, I can describe the sweatness, I can let you hear the slurp and humming of pleasure. But until you actually try it, you will not understand how wonderful it is.
This is true of many healthy lifestyle choices like bicycle commuting.

Just as going for a long nature hike helps you appreciate the forest, bicycle commuting gives you an appreciation for your city or town. You interract with the neighborhoods and have contact with the people you pass by. I regularly enjoy the flutter of wings from birds, butterflys, and other animals. This always brings a smile to my face. I get the joy of hearing friends and acquaintances greet me by name as we pass. This is a stark contrast to the typical toot of the horn that most folks experience. Cycling gives me the chance to have an impromptu conversation with anyone I like. For people who want to know their neighbors and have a community, walking or bicycling to get somewhere is the best way to achieve this.
I don't expect the majority to 'get it' right away. What I enjoy every day is the result of showing great courage to deviate from the status-quo of society. Not everyone is willing to jump off the bandwagon so quickly. Howevever I suggest as with any other new adventure-just try it once. Find someone in your neighborhood who rides, or talk to folks at the bike shop. I'm sure that there will be plenty of enthusiastic folks right around the corner. And if you have trouble finding anyone, look up my email at the bottom of the page.
I wish you good luck and peace;
Aaron.

The best story was an experience that happened while leaving work one afternoon. I headed out through downtown and was going towards the river, when a woman called out my name. It was my girlfriend at the time, so I slowed down and we had some quality time together to talk and catch up on the events of our day before I had to head off for a meeting. This was such a beautiful experience, and we would never have had the chance to connect if I had been in an enclosed vehicle.
Another time that I rode home, I happened to wave hello to a fellow as I passed and then we exchanged friendly greetings at the light. Well a few blocks later as I turned the corner, there he was again. So we said hello again and I continued on. At the next light we saw each other once more. So we started joking about the coincidence and what a great city this was. When I got home, my roommate Bill asked me who my friend was that I was talking with. He had seen us chatting. I said it was just someone I'met on the way home. I asked Bill where he had been since I hadn't seen him. He replied that he'd been driving down the adjacent arterial. So it's very interesting that I had been able to develop a more involved conversation with someone I had never previously met simply because neither of us were enclosed.
I had stopped by the farmer's market and chatted with a friend of mine. We happened to talk about fig season and how wonderful they are. Shortly after leaving the market, I happened to see a fig tree and the person at the house was out front pulling a few from the branches. So we chatted for a few minutes and I mentioned how pretty fig trees were in addition to having wonderful fruit. He in turn shared the story of having planted the tree only a few years before and it was already full of sweet figs. At the end of our conversation, he handed me a small bag full of very ripe sweet figs. I had such a beautiful trip home that day eating fresh figs.
While coming home from work I was riding through a residential neighborhood. I usually keep an eye on the sidewalk, and say 'Hello' to pedestrians. This time I happened to see a child running down the sidewalk. A second later I saw a ball roll towards the street. So I did a quick check behind, and swerved into the middle of the road while signaling the car behind me to stop. Sure enough, the kid runs out into the street and gets the ball, then returns to the sidewalk. There was of course no way of communicating to the driver that I saved this child from visiting the hospital. Such situations have since happened a couple more times. I'm proud to know that I have probably saved a number of lives through my slower speed and unrestricted vision.

Despite assumptions to the contrary, Americans prefer the idea of traveling by bicycle on traffic free streets. However we find ourselves caught in a catch 22. The streets are considered too dangerous for bicycling – because of traffic. And because the streets are perceived as dangerous, we feel the need to drive cars.

Roadways are only dangerous when drivers do not expect to see a bicyclist. As verified by Transportation Alternatives - a New York advocacy group - the more bicyclists inhabit a roadway, the more drivers expect them and treat them as legitimate users. By doubling the number of bicyclists on a roadway, the chance of being struck by a vehicle drops by 1/3.

So let’s put it into perspective. Everything has risks. Failure Analysis Associates Inc. found per 1,000,000 exposure hours, the fatalities are 128.71 for skydiving, 1.07 for swimming, 0.47 for motoring and 0.26 for bicycling. Which proves that driving is twice as dangerous as bicycling which, additionally, reduces roadway stress.

The following commentary from Mr. H. William Batt offers an open ended discussion describing the positive effects that a bicycling infrastructure provides. Mr. Batt is a political scientist and an advisor for the New York Bicycling Coalition.

May 17 1993
H. William Batt, New York Bicycling Coalition

It can if anything can. Because otherwise the automobile transportation system is going to make us completely unable to compete economically with Europe and Japan.

It’s not just that motor vehicle transportation destroys much of our environment. It has caused the country to pave over in asphalt the equivalent of New Hampshire, Vermont, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and New Jersey in surface area. In some cities, like Los Angeles, one half of all the land area is devoted to cars. (and all of this investment now requires maintenance) It has made us dependent upon fossil fuels to the point that our international balance of payments and national security is threatened. It is responsible for almost 50 thousand deaths each year and 2 million injuries serious enough for hospitalization. These liabilities, considerable as they are, still don’t address the fundamental point. One must look at how we Americans expend our resources to really understand what our motor vehicle transportation system is doing to us. We are all familiar with the fact that we now spend over 13 percent of our gross domestic product on health care, shortly to grow to 15 percent by common agreement. (This is twice what Holland spends, for example, and they have better health too by all accounts.) We are also all familiar with the fact that we have been spending about 6 percent of our GDP on defense, although this may decline somewhat in the next decade. And we spend about 18-19 percent on food. We don’t know for certain how U.S. stacks up in other economic sectors; economists haven’t done the input-output analysis of other industrialized countries that this requires. But there is some indication that we spend almost twice the proportion on transportation as our competitors do internationally. We also spend an inordinate amount, more than any other nation, on our housing, particularly in consequence of the incentives offered by our tax system. What this all means is that we have substantially less of our GDP left available to use on education, research and industrial development, recreation, and other sectors. It is particularly obvious to those of us who have traveled overseas to see how dependent we are on our cars.

But what is worse is that we are pretty much locked in to these patterns. Our infrastructure is in place; we can’t quickly alter it to increase our transportation efficiencies. We’re stuck with it. Even if we doubled, or tripled, the price of gasoline through heavy taxes and fees (as European nations have and Al Gore suggested we do), we’d still be stuck dependent on our cars at this point.

But since most auto trips are short, bicycles could play a part if only we made it possible.have to make bike travel safe i.e. less threatened by cars. And we’d have to make bike lanes available and useful. Will we? That’s a good question.
Can we persuade the urban public not to use the sides of most streets for their private parking places, and give them over for bicycle lanes? (in Japan, you can’t buy a car unless you can show you have a place to park it off the street.) Will we be willing to insulate bike trails from the threats of motorized traffic? Would we be willing to change our land use policies such that bike trails through the back yards of suburban landowners could be built? (Is there any alternative?)

The problems and challenges of adapting our society to compete with other nations will require looking at the amount we spend on transportation and to look at what modes. ISTEA (The Intermodal Surface Transportation Efficiency Act of 1991) calls for a transportation system that is “economically efficient, environmentally sound, provides the foundation for the Nation to compete in the global economy and will move people and goods in an energy efficient manner.” If we take it seriously, it will require us to radically alter our lifestyles. And if we can’t even talk about an increased gas tax, how will we ever address the challenges of a bicycle-friendly society, before it is already too late?

Mr. Batt is a political scientist who advises the New York Bicycling Coalition on transportation policy issues. He first came to realize the importance of bicycles as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Thailand in 1963. For more information contact the New York Bicycle Coalition, PO BOX 7335, Albany, NY 12224

Motor Vehicle Transportation and Proper Pricing
H. William Batt, New York Bicycling Coalition One 1993 study concluded that "when the full range of costs of transportation are tallied, passenger ground transportation costs the American public a total of $1.2 to $1.6 trillion each year. This is equal to about one-quarter of the annual GNP and is greater than our total national annual expenditure on either education or health." Japan, by way of comparison, spends an estimated 10.4% to satisfy all its transportation requirements, although the figure might be a bit low because not all externalities are included in the calculation. One of the reasons we are spending so much on motor vehicle transportation is that our public policies encourage it. User fees represented only about $33 billion in 1991 while the true costs to society were ten times that; put another way, drivers pay only 10% of the true costs of their motor vehicle use.

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