I hiked through some mud in north St. Louis this afternoon to capture this photo of the new Interstate 70 Bridge, which is almost spanning the Mississippi River. Due to open in 2014.
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Image by Erich Vieth[/caption]
As I do much of the time, I commuted to my job on a bicycle. It's a 4 1/2 mile trip that offers me many benefits. I park on the 6th floor of the garage. Though I sometimes ride up the circular garage ramps, today I decided to take the garage elevator. A woman stepped in; then I joined her with my bike.
"Oh, I suppose you are delivering something, but you are taking your bicycle with you in this elevator?" "No, actually, I'm an attorney and I work in this office building." "Oh . . . " [Giving me the expression of "Why would a lawyer ride a bike to work?"]I work in a building that probably has more than 1,000 employees, and as far as I can tell, I'm the only person who rides a bike to work. That's not how it would be in many cities, such as Denver or San Francisco, but that's how it is here in St. Louis. One of the many benefits of bicycling is the cost savings, and it's not just about gasoline. On Thursday, a local bike shop is going to change out my chain and give the bike a complete overhaul, essentially for the cost of two gasoline fill-ups. Other than that, yearly maintenance mostly consists of a few tire tubes and some chain lube. Further, when the commute is less than five miles in city riding, it takes only a a bit longer than it takes to commute by car. It's win, win, win, but a lot of people won't consider switching over to bicycle because it's undignified, or a "toy," or you might get wet if it rains, or it's simply not the way that they have commuted for years, and they are not going to consider changing. They should reconsider, because they are losing out.
I often commute by bicycle, so this article caught my eye. In three separate incidents, three cyclists in San Francisco have killed pedestrians by running into them. This most recent example suggests flagrant and reckless conduct on behalf of the cyclist. I sometimes tell people that I prefer riding a bike to driving a car, because although I might get myself killed, it's not like I'm going to kill someone else on my bike. Well, I need to rethink that.
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 and 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."