With carbon emissions on the rise, a rapidly growing global population, and depleting fossil fuels, America and the rest of the world are scrambling to find sources of alternative energies and other means of transportation that can allow us as humans to grow economically while being mindful of our fragile Earth. Almost everywhere we look there are companies “going green” by recycling waste, solar panels on the tops of buildings, and wind turbines in our hills and valleys to use less of what we have to and to conserve what is left. Still, despite all of our efforts, global temperatures are rising and we continue to burn fossil fuels at an alarming rate in our homes and we support those companies who haven’t gone green by continuing to buy from them. Next to power plants, our cars are most responsible for the carbon emissions and greenhouse gases that make their way into the ozone. I try to do my part in eliminating as much waste as possible by recycling bottles, cans, and paper products, but most of all I try to leave my car at home and either ride my bike or carpool with someone to the places I need to go. I want to explain my decision to commute by bike and how it can help to save the world that you and I share.
In today’s America, cars and light trucks account for nearly 40% of the country’s oil consumption while producing almost one-fifth of its total carbon dioxide emissions. That means that this sect of America’s drivers produces almost 6% of the entire world’s carbon dioxide while they’re driving alone, sitting in traffic, or making senseless short trips to the store or to go shopping, which is one reason why our country is leading the world in green house gas emissions. 6% doesn’t really sound like much, but human activities such as making cement, burning grasslands and forests, and using fossil fuels emits nearly 30 billion tons of carbon dioxide every year. Our values are often ignorantly placed on possessions (like big cars) to the point that we make sure to capitalize on the “I” in “Americans”, using more resources than we should to get something we don’t need because “we want to”. America knows there is a problem; we can feel the temperatures rising around us and we know there was less snow last Christmas than there was the year before, but why aren’t we doing anything about it? If we know that the cars we drive are terribly inefficient, then what do we do?
In October of 2006, Dirt Rag Magazine (a bike magazine based out of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) decided to test how inefficient our cars were and see just how far someone could ride a bike on the caloric equivalent of a (one) gallon of gas. Through scientific experiments, and probably some time searching on the internet, they discovered that there were around 31,000 kilocalories, or Calories, of potential energy in one gallon of gasoline. Their next step was to put someone on a bike and have them ride off 31,000 Calories to see how far they traveled. The end result, the distance the cyclist made it, was 633 miles from the front door of their office building. Are you having trouble figuring out how far that is? Imagine riding a bike from Boone, North Carolina to New York City (or Ann Arbor, Michigan) via interstates; the average car on the road today only gets around 22-25 miles per gallon. On a two-mile round trip journey to the grocery store, I have found it quicker to ride my bicycle to get what I need than it is to drive my car. Time spent waiting for people to walk across the lot and looking for a parking spot is instead spent leaving my bike at the front door, walking in to grab what I need, and going back to my house. Many people that are skeptical of commuting by bike in cities often try to make the argument that bicycles can’t keep up in traffic, that they only get in the way of motorists and slow down the flow of traffic. In fact, it is quite the opposite.
In urban areas, the rate of flow of traffic rarely exceeds a maximum of 22 miles per hour. In the stop and go traffic that is common within cities it is not difficult at all for the average cyclist to keep pace with the flow of traffic and not slow it down at all. Contrary to popular belief, in these situations and environments it is actually cars that slow down the cyclists who are occupying the same roadway. Automobiles take up about the same amount of space as five bicycles, meaning bicycle traffic jams clears up five times sooner while auto traffic lines are five times longer. Productivity of bike messengers in large cities is much higher than that of their motorist counterparts because of the aforementioned ability to navigate through traffic quicker and employers tend to like to use them more, too, because of the lower prices due to the lack of need to buy gas.
What it boils down to is this: our burning of fossil fuels at an increasing rate is only killing us faster, causing more diseases, and ends up costing us more money in the long run. Our laziness has caused us to become one of the most obese nations in the world and senselessly driving our cars for short errands is burning thousands upon thousands of barrels of oil every day and emitting unneeded poisons in the air. The two combined are causing heart disease and respiratory diseases and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars on newly passed healthcare plans to afford the doctors and medicines needed to keep them alive and doing the same thing to themselves over and over again. Part of the solution to what has become a crisis is right in front of us, it is in the actions of many of our college students and it can lead us to find that youthful spirit we thought we’d lost as we grew older. Commuting by bike will not only help us find our sense of adventure, it can and will reduce the amount of greenhouse gases we release into the air, give us the exercise we need to be more fit individuals, and will lead us in the right direction to hopefully eliminate our dependence on fossil fuels. It is better to make these small changes now than to have our children and grand children pay for it later.
