Health and Environmental Benefits of Cycling

Since we assume that bike libraries are set up to promote mass use of bicycles, in this section we will also assume that bike libraries have somewhat direct effects on public and environmental health.

Environmental benefits are extensively connected with the larger health benefits of cycling. In addition to direct health benefits to human-beings, it brings benefits for other forms of beings, for the ecology in general.

Bicycle use brings out health and environmental benefits on a set of levels:

  1. Physical and physiological benefits for the individual user
  2. Benefits by reducing the motor vehicle traffic
    • Reduction in air-water-soil pollution
    • Reduction in wasteful land-use
    • Reduction in noise pollution
    • Reduction in accidents
      • Reduction in deaths
      • Reduction in serious injuries
      • Reduction in psychological traumas due to traffic accidents
      • Reduction in economic loss
      • Reduction in productivity loss
  3. Benefits through the creation of friendlier neighborhoods
    • Reduction of crime
    • Enhancing the sense of community
    • Psychological well-being of the community
  4. Benefits through encouraging building compact human-ecological features (e.g. compact towns and cities)
    • Protecting open space (e.g. wetlands, forests, meadowlands, nature preserves etc.)
  5. Reduction of oil consumption and thus reduction in
    • Fossil fuel oriented drilling, pipelining, shipping etc.
    • Oil related wars

As for the urgency in getting more cars off the roads, the external costs of motor-vehicle transport should be revisited.

One of the most dramatic external costs of this mode is the number of fatalities and serious injuries due to motor-vehicle accidents. According to the National Transportation Statistics of 2005, in only 10 year span between 1990 and 2000, more than 480,000 people died due to traffic accidents involving motor vehicles. During the same period, by comparison, the total number of deaths due to accidents involving mass transit and railroad modes was about 15,000 - about 31 times less than the highway figures. Moreover, every year about 3 million people get injured because of motor-vehicle traffic accidents (Table 2.1).

“Highways, cars, and trucks accounted for 95 percent of the nation’s transportation fatalities and 97 percent of the injuries. (...)Whereas highways were responsible for about 86 percent of all person trips, they accounted for 94 percent of the nation's transportation fatalities. Transit, on the other hand, accounted for nearly 4 percent of all person trips yet less than 1 percent of all transportation fatalities and 2 percent of injuries" (Gillham 119). As noted elsewhere on this website, in the meantime, “the monetary cost of U.S. motor vehicle accidents in 1986, for example, was estimated to be $74.2 billion….Motor vehicle fatalities for the period of 1977-88 exceed all U.S. battlefield fatalities in all wars from the revolutionary war through the Vietnam War” (Loeb et al. 2). Banister notes that on average traffic accidents cause 250,000 deaths and 10 million injuries each year worldwide (16).

Another direct burden that motor-vehicles put on the society yet fail to pay is the cost of deaths and illnesses due to air, water, and soil pollution from the exhaust gases.

Low and Gleeson note that we have only recently begun to comprehend the full extent of impact that motor-vehicle traffic has on our health. They cite a study done on the impact of cars on German society. The study finds cars "responsible for 47,000 deaths each year and a range of other, less severe, health impacts" (120). These motor-vehicle related health impacts are summarized in Table 7.1 (121).

These figures put the motor-vehicle transport mode on the top of the public health concern with the deaths from these causes being “about 5 times greater than deaths from road traffic accidents" (120). In the US, adding 5 times more to about 40,000 deaths each year directly caused by traffic accidents, the number of deaths related to motor-vehicle traffic would be about 240,000 each year. Users of motor-vehicles pay only a miniscule fraction of this cost and of course the lives lost can never be paid back.


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