Abby Quillen

Freelance Content Marketing Writer and Editor

Alternative transportation

A Snapshot of Car-Usage in America

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(Originally published September 14, 2009, reprinted in celebration of National Bike Month)

The 5 U.S. cities (1,000+ population) with the least car ownership* (2000 census):

  1. Hooper Bay, Alaska (Pop. 1022) – 95.65% of households car-free.
  2. New Square Village, NY (Pop. 4707) – 73.77% of households car-free.
  3. Kaser Village, NY (Pop. 3299) – 68.57% of households car-free.
  4. Kiryas Joel Village, NY – (Pop. 13,214) – 57.78% of households car-free.
  5. Kotzebue, Alaska – (Pop. 3082) – 51.29% of households car-free.

Number of U.S. cities (1000+ Population) in which 100% of households own a car (2000 census):

155

Average cost per year of owning and operating a vehicle (2008):

$8,095

Average percentage of household income Americans spend on transportation costs each year (2007):

17.65%

Number of minutes per day the average American reports spending behind the wheel (2007):

87

Amount of time the average 16 year-old American will spend driving a car in his or her lifetime (Figure based on 87 minutes per day average driving-time and a 77.8 year life-expectancy):

3.73 years

Percentage of workers who commute to work in a car alone every day:

85%

Average cost of a new car:

$28,400

Number of motor vehicles scrapped in the U.S. every year (2007):

12,737,000

Federal Highway Administration budget for 2010:

50 billion

Federal Transit Administration budget for 2010:

10 billion

Federal Railway Administration budget for 2010:

1.5 billion

*Click on hyperlinks to see sources for statistics.

May is National Bike Month!

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I’m taking a blogging vacation and a mini digital detox this week to hang out with family visiting from out of town. But in honor of National Bike Month, I’ll be celebrating bikes all week by rerunning some of my previous posts about bicycles and car-free living. I hope you enjoy them, and I’ll see you next week!

Credit: Tammy Strobel

Bicycle Love (originally published May 5, 2009)

May is National Bike Month! Oh bikes, how I love thee. Let me count the reasons…..

10.  Bikes are quiet.

You’ll never get woken up at midnight, because your teenage neighbor’s revving his bike engine. And imagine if they replaced that freeway next to your house with a seven-lane bike path.

9.  You can cart groceries home on a bike.

Baskets are classy. Panniers are sophisticated. Cargo bikes are cool. And you can make your own hauling machine with a simple grocery cart.

8.  Bikes run on renewable resources – food, water, and human calories.

With the obesity rate hovering around 35%, quite a few of us have some calories to spare.

7.  Cycling tones your muscles, heart, and lungs.

The American Heart Association says all healthy adults ages 18 to 65 should get at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise five days a week. With a bike, you can probably get that on your commute to work.

6.  Bikes enable you to smile and wave at your neighbors.

Social isolation is growing in the U.S. Let’s get out of our cars and take a spin around our neighborhoods.

5.  Bikes are thrifty.

Check out Bike at Work’s calculator to see how much cash you can save by dumping your car.

4.  Bikes emit zero pollution.

Automobiles belch out 333 million tons of carbon dioxide a year, not to mention nitrogen oxide, sulpher oxide, toluene, benzene, formaldehyde, and more. All bikes emit is a little human sweat.

3.  Once you’ve learned how to ride a bike, you never forget.

What can I say … it’s like riding a bike.

2. Bikes are economical.

What’s the world’s most efficient mode of transportation? You guessed it – the bike. For energy burned per miles travelled, cycling is three to five times more efficient than walking. And it trounces running, driving a moped, taking a train, car-pooling, horseback riding, and swimming. (Sadly the least efficient mode of transport seems to be America’s favorite – driving a car with no passengers.)

And finally, the ultimate reason I love the bicycle…..

1. Bikes took down the bustle and the corset.

That’s right, ladies. The bicycle craze in the 1890s changed womens’ fashion forever. Women abandoned their confining corsets and adopted what was known as common-sense dressing.

In 1896, Susan B. Anthony said, “I think [the bicycle] has done more to emancipate women than anything else in the world. It gives a woman a feeling of freedom and self-reliance. The moment she takes her seat she knows she can’t get into harm unless she gets off her bicycle, and away she goes, the picture of free, untrammeled womanhood.”

bicycling not buttons

Let’s celebrate our two-wheeled friends all month by taking them everywhere. Note that Bike-to-Work Week is May 17-21, and Bike–to-Work Day is Friday, May 21. Employers can find out how to participate here.

What are your top reasons for loving bikes?


Adults on Bikes

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Shareable.net published my article about three different bike cooperatives today. It starts:

Over a hundred years ago, H.G. Wells famously quipped, “When I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the future of the human race.”

When Wells wrote his novel Cycles of Change in 1896, the world was in the throes of a bicycling craze. James Kemp Starley’s 1885 invention of the modern bicycle enabled the working classes to travel quickly and cheaply for the first time. Women who had been constricted in corsets, hoops, and petticoats were donning bloomers and discovering a newfound freedom of movement.

Today in the United States it can be harder to muster Wells’ optimism about the bicycle. Only one percent of urban trips in this country are made by bike, and only 0.55 percent of people commute to work on a bicycle.

And although Susan B. Anthony once credited the bicycle with doing “more to emancipate women than anything else in the world,” today the vast majority of American cyclists are white males. According to research by John Pucher, American men make three times more trips by bicycle than women. Plus, a 2008 NSGA Sports Performance Study found that while African Americans and Hispanics make up 12 and 15 percent of the U.S. population respectively, each group represents only about six percent of bicyclists.

Obviously there are some huge barriers to bicycling in the United States, especially for women and minorities.

Nevertheless I discovered ample reason for optimism about the future of American bicycling. In cities across the country, people are coming together to form bicycle cooperatives with the mission to make buying, building, and repairing bikes an affordable, accessible, and shareable experience. And many of them are reaching out to women and minorities.

You can read the rest of the article here.

Plan a Bicycle Trip

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Google Maps added a “bicycle” option! Now they’ll help you find the best route by car, public transit, on foot, or by bicycle. The bike function is still being tested, and Google is asking for users’ feedback to guarantee their routes are actually bicycle-safe.

I just tested it by asking for a map of the best bicycle route from my house to my friend’s house across town. I wouldn’t say it chose the absolute best route, as it sent me up a busy street when I know of a couple of safer, more enjoyable routes. But it was a much better route for biking than the way they recommend for cars. So it’s definitely an improvement.

Check it out!

And speaking of bikes, I can’t tell you how happy it makes me that my son is crazy about them. He runs and find his bike first thing in the morning, and he squeals “Vroom vroom” every time someone rides past on a bike. He’s also a big fan of wearing his helmet and riding in his bike trailer.

In this nice, peaceful stretch of time before he starts making everything into guns, I must also say, it’s thrilling to see how much he loves reading books, or “nanomes” as he calls them, and smelling flowers, or “floofs”.

And yes, he’s also big on making up his own words.

Bamboo Bicycles

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A couple of years ago, my husband and I were going to plant running bamboo along our back fence. Then we casually mentioned the idea to our next-door neighbor. She looked, well, terrified.

Bamboo is an amazing plant. It’s used to make musical instruments, toys, tools, weapons, flooring, paper, food, cooking oil, vinegar, and alcohol. But it’s also a bit noxious, at least in these parts.

When we were thinking of growing it, we visited a peaceful bamboo garden on the outskirts of town. The gardener showed us around and explained the difference between the many varieties of bamboo that rustled overhead in the slight breeze.

Then the conversation turned to warfare.

“You’ll need to dig a two-foot-deep trench all the way around your bamboo and bury this in it.” He held up a roll of thick, black plastic. “This needs to stick up at least three inches above the soil. The bamboo’s rhizomes will try to jump it. So leave a foot or so of bare ground all the way around the trench. That way you can see them coming over. When they do, mow them down immediately.”

It sounded more like prison-tower watch duty than gardening.

But there’s an upside to bamboo’s invasive nature. It is not only a useful plant; it’s an incredibly renewable resource.

And now you can get a bike made out of it.

Although riding a bike is considerably more environmentally-sound than driving a car, most bike frames are constructed out of materials that are decidedly not renewable. Think: steel, carbon fiber, aluminum, molybdenum, and titanium. Extracting these elements is labor-intensive, environmentally destructive, and can threaten public health.

For instance, I grew up 60 miles down-river of Leadville, Colorado, where the mining industry allowed heavy metals such as lead, arsenic, cadmium, and zinc to leach into the soil and water. The Environmental Protection Agency declared Leadville and the 20 square-miles around the town a Superfund site.

So imagine if we could make strong, light-weight, functional bicycles without mining, not to mention out of plants that grow like weeds. Well, we’re getting closer to that reality, although most bamboo bicycles contain some metal components.

You can purchase your own custom-made bamboo bicycle from Calfree Design. They claim that their bikes are tough, and they offer a ten-year warranty on them. They’re expensive though. All of the frames that are “on special” on Calfree’s website cost well over $1,000. But “if there were an award for ‘Bicycle with lowest carbon footprint’ (least amount of carbon dioxide emissions in the production of the frame), this frame would win, hands down,” Calfree’s site boasts.

You can also learn how to build a bamboo bicycle yourself.

Bamboo Bike Studio in Brooklyn offers workshops where you can learn to build one in a weekend. They’re also not cheap. The full bike workshop costs $932 and the frame-only workshop costs $632.

But some of the proceeds go to a great cause. The Bamboo Bike Studio is working with partners, including the Bamboo Bike Project, to establish bamboo bicycle factories in “Millennium Cities, starting with Kumasi, Ghana, Kisumu, Kenya, and Quito, Ecuador.” They hope the factories will, “provide a lower-cost, more durable, locally manufactured form of transport specifically designed for local terrain.” Unfortunately you’ll have to wait awhile to attend one of their workshops. They’re full through September.

But if you’re seriously into do-it-yourself, you could check out this how-to on Instructables. (However, as the disclaimer says, “Death or serious injury can result from a bicycle frame failure. … Be smart.)

Hopefully as more companies start to manufacture bamboo bicycles, the prices will come down, making bamboo bicycles a more accessible option for more people.

Would you ride a bamboo bicycle?

Cars are going out of style.

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car

That’s right, car-free living is in the news this week.

The New York Times featured a story, “Is Happiness Still That New Car Smell?” by Micheline Maynard about the increasing trend of people going car-free because of the recession.

Maynard writes, “The recession and a growing awareness of the environment are causing many people to reassess their automobile ownership. After more than a century in which an automobile represented the American dream, car enthusiasm may no longer be a part of Americans’ DNA.”

Read the article here.

And Bob Sawatski wrote about the auto accident that made him go car-free in his Writer’s in the Range column this week.

“The more you drive, the dumber you get. Driving makes people act like rats trapped in a maze. You lose touch with your senses, your imagination and your compassion for other travelers on the road of life. Air-bagged, air-conditioned, locked in and desensitized, drivers assume they’re safe,” Sawatski writes.

Read his essay here.