Jonathan Patz is the author of a new study indicating the “Four Way Win” that occurs when people choose bicycling over the use of automobiles. I’m completely on board, and I speak from experience as a person who commutes by bicycle more often than not to my job, which is about 5 miles from my home. The study by Patz offers some impressive numbers:

In the study, published today in Environmental Health Perspectives, Patz and his colleagues looked to the more than 30 million people residing in urban and suburban areas of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio a

nd Wisconsin. They asked: What if during the nicest six months of the year, those residents left their cars at home for round-trips of five miles or less? And what if they chose to replace half of those short car trips, which account for about 20 percent of all vehicle miles traveled, with cycling? According to their calculations, making those short trips on bicycles could save approximately four trillion pounds of carbon dioxide emissions, 1,100 lives and $7 billion in mortality and health care costs for the region every year. “Fighting global climate change could be one of the greatest public health opportunities we’ve had in a century.”