"What will you do with all the money you save?"

The city planning which has become standard since WWII creates only one option for transportation....the car. And having the use of an automobile costs each of us virtually the same amount (direct cost calculated at $0.86 per mile) . This means that only the upper, and upper-middle class are able to comfortably afford 2 cars per household. The rest of the country must struggle through 8-12 hour days in order to spend 20% of their income on an unnecessary luxury.

The Federal Government subsidies for the oil industry include:

$5.7 billion: - the Strategic Petroleum Reserve
$784 million: - the Percentage Depletion Allowance
$769 million: - the Nonconventional Fuel Production Credit
$200 million: - the Enhanced Oil Recovery Credit
$97 million: - the Department of Interiors Oil Resources Management Programs
The International Center for Technology Assessment

Because of all of those dangerous cars of course. The irony may be lost on some people that they are using a car because all of those vehicles make the roads too dangerous to ride a bike or walk. Take a look at your city. Which roadways are the most convenient to drive along, and which are the most comfortable to walk on? You can be sure that the very roadways which are most convenient are equally the most dangerous to walk across. Of course despite stringent efforts to avoid this, every one of us is a pedestrian at some point. Therefore it behooves us to work for safer streets, neighborhoods, and parking lots. This is what caused me to make the conscious decision to move to Portland, which has taken profound steps to create safe roadways.

image of european town with sound of amserdam next to image of traffic and sound of traffic

Well there are several options.
First you also don't need to become Lance Armstrong. Little changes can make a very big difference. Get in touch with your co-workers and set up a carpool. See what options there are for taking the bus. Try walking to the nearest grocery store once in a while, or pick up a prescription while you're out for your next bike ride. Do this on a weekend morning when traffic is infrequent. By using your body for transportation, you increase your health, your interaction with neighbors, and your awareness of the surrounding neighborhoods. In addition, your presence on the road makes everyone else safer.

Second, get to know your local representatives. Politicians are feeling an increasing amount of pressure to improve alternative transportation options. By getting involved in the current events, you can have a voice in what planners are designing.
"As traffic and smog continue to degrade quality of life for millions of Americans, visionary communities are turning to alternative transportation choices, such as modern commuter trains, clean bus lines, vanpools, bike paths and safe sidewalks to improve quality of life. By focusing on moving people rather than autos, these communities are pulling commuters out of traffic jams by giving them more choices in how they get to work."(1)

Third, talk to others who have made the change. You don't have to re-invent the wheel (pun intended) in order to make changes in your life. This website is full of links and information from people who have been using alternative transportation for years. (living by bike)
In short there are many issues which need to be addressed with regard to our modern transportation infrastructure. However with a few small changes, we can all take part in making our communities a comfortable place for our children to enjoy. If we all just get out of the car and smell the flowers once in awhile, we might decide that we don't want a parking lot behind them.

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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