The One-Mile Solution
This just in from Bob Mionske’s “Legally Speaking” on cycling website Velo News. Minoske got it from Andy Cline’s piece (”Two-Wheeled Wonder”) in Sierra Magazine, March/April 2008. It’s not for the over-50 crowd, specifically, but great for everybody with a bike, so I’m passing it along:
What if there was something you could do to improve your health and fitness, save money, reduce our dependence on foreign oil, improve air quality, and reduce your carbon footprint, all at the same time—would you do it?
The idea is simple…Draw a circle with a 1-mile radius around your home. Try to replace one car trip per week within that circle by riding a bicycle or walking. At an easy riding pace you can travel one mile on a bicycle in about seven minutes. Walking takes about 20 minutes at an easy pace.
As Cline writes: “nearly half of all trips in the United States are three miles or less; more than a quarter are less than a mile” Short car trips are the easiest to replace with biking or walking, and they are the biggest polluters, per mile: “Engines running cold produce four times the carbon monoxide and twice the volatile organic compounds of engines running hot. Smog-forming (and carcinogenic) VOCs continue to evaporate from an engine until it cools off, whether the engine’s been running for five minutes or five hours.
Cline cites a recent study: “the transportation sector accounts for about one-third of all human-generated greenhouse gas emissions. Within that sector, travel by personal vehicles accounts for nearly two-thirds of those emissions.”
Try the one-mile solution a few times, Cline hopes, you’ll soon be biking or walking to the store twice a week, then ditching your car for most of your trips inside the circle.
Source: VeloNews.com
