There is no denying that we at KineticShift love our bicycles. While not everyone on our staff is a regular bike rider, even those that don’t do the two wheel thing admit it has many benefits. And according to a study just published in the scientific journal Environmental Health Perspectives cutting out short auto trips and replacing them with mass transit and active transport would yield major health benefits, but also save about $3.8 billion per year from avoided mortality and reduced health care costs for conditions like obesity and heart disease.
The report calculated that these measures would save an estimated $7 billion, including 1,100 lives each year from improved air quality and increased physical fitness.
“We talk about the cost of changing energy systems, the cost of alternative fuels, but we seldom talk about this kind of benefit,” says Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The study of the largest 11 metropolitan statistical areas in the upper Midwest began by identifying the air pollution reductions that would result from eliminating the short auto trips. A small average reduction in very fine particles, which lodge deep in the lung and have repeatedly been tied to asthma, which affects 8.2 percent of U.S. citizens, and deaths due to cardiovascular and pulmonary diseases, was a major source of health benefits, says co-author Scott Spak, who worked on the study at UW-Madison and is now at the University of Iowa.
“The reductions tend to be much larger during high pollution episodes, and even small changes reduce a chronic exposure that affects the 31.3 million people living throughout the region — not just in these metropolitan areas, but even hundreds of miles downwind,” Spak says.
Of course the key is to have a safe place to ride. While many cities, such as Chicago and New York have devoted significant resources to bike infrastructure in recent years, much of the country, especially in suburban areas lags behind. The new study notes this fact and suggests that a crucial next step is making cities more bike friendly, with better parking, bike racks on buses and trains, and more bike lanes and especially separate bike paths.
If we can’t do it for health reasons, maybe it can be done for the financial reasons.