Blog Action Day: Is American Cycling Beneficial to the Environment? (Comments: 1)

This essay is part of RocBike.com’s contribution to Blog Action Day

This is perhaps a deeper subject than can or should be fleshed out in a “Cycling Thoughts” blog post. But I’ve been thinking about this topic in recent days and since the environmental-themed Blog Action Day’s coming to a close, there’s no better time to put it out there.

The concept of bike commuting is nothing new. Be sure to watch this film of a trip down San Francisco’s Market Street in 1905 to see bikes peacefully coexist with automobiles, streetcars, coaches, and pedestrians. It goes without saying, though, that mass production and cheap energy have made the automobile the preferred mode of transportation in the United States. Our world has suffered for it. And bicycles, to many, are nothing more than toys for children, or exercise devices, or sporting equipment.

There’s nothing wrong with using a bike for the mere enjoyment of it. And certainly, as forms of recreation go, bicycles are kind to the environment. But if you’re throwing your bike onto your car’s bike rack and driving out to the trail in the neighboring suburb, you’re burning fossil fuel for fun. You’re probably a great person and you really do deserve to get out on the trail and yeah, it’s just the way our culture works. But in this case, your bike’s just another excuse to blow carbon into the air.

Many of us have taken to bike commuting for some or all of our daily transport, specifically to replace what we’d be doing with a car if we weren’t so eccentric, and this of course directly reduces our impact on the environment. So we can go ahead and pat ourselves on the back right now. But the percentage of Americans who voluntarily commute by bike on any given day, while perhaps growing, is quite low.

This statistics-filled essay about the environmental benefits of cycling from the League of American Bicyclists makes a lot of nice points with a lot of statistics. But one number jumped out at me – it states that 20% of household survey respondents said they used a bike for transportation within the past 30 days. I think that’s the percentage of people who used a bike for any sort of transport, and the majority of that transport would be the recreational kind that has either zero or a negative impact on the environment.

There is an oft-forgotten bike commuting demographic that I should mention. Many Americans live below the so-called “poverty line,” and these people are a large portion of the bike commuting population. They also account for a substantial number of public transport users. But in their case, it’s not the use of bicycles that’s reducing their environmental impact, but serious poverty, and that’s nothing to take comfort in.

I think that in only a small percentage of cases, the sale of a bike at a bike shop results in the reduction of fossil fuel output. It’s good to see that bike companies like Trek are campaigning to make bike commuting more mainstream, and they obviously think they can gain customers this way. But even Trek’s promotional page mentions bike recreation as part of the environmental impact goal, as if they’re too afraid to leave it out.

We need to recognize how the deep-rooted perceptions of bicycling in our culture prevent us from realizing any serious benefits, and we must strike at those roots, even by simply leading by example. See you out on the road.

Possibly Related (Automically Generated)

• No Related Post