Report - Physical inactivity causes 10% of all worldwide deaths

CNN reports that a report series in The Lancet notes that physical inactivity is just as deadly as smoking or obesity. (Obviously the latter and physical inactivity are also linked.) If inactivity rates drop by 10-20%, then anything between one half to 1.3 million lives can be saved annually worldwide. The authors consider such inactivity to be equivalent to a pandemic.

In the third article of the series, Gregory Heath of the University of Tennessee wrote that "Because even moderate physical activity such as walking and cycling can have substantial health benefits, understanding strategies that can increase these behaviors in different regions and cultures has become a public health priority," and that improvements in mass transit and the walking and cycling environment can produce real benefits. As has been previously mentioned, we have engineered much physical activity out of our lives, but we can reverse the trend. Support for improved cycling and walking infrastructure in our communities have the following beneficial effects.

1. Improved health,
2. Decreased cost - I had mentioned that a car cost $11-$22 per day
3. Improved environment,
4. Decreased congestion,
5. Improved community, with people being more neighborly and social,
6. and Decreased dependence on foreign oil.

And all of these benefits take place at the same time making such investments a wise use of resources, provided that the money allocated for such is spent wisely.

Road Repairs

Smart Growth America and Taxpayers for Common Sense have just released a report entitled Repair Priorities: Transportation spending strategies to save taxpayer dollars and improve roads. The report basically makes the point that many of the existing roads are not in good shape, and that it would be most cost-effective to repair the existing roads before they deteriorate further. However, states have a tendency to build and expand new roads before caring for existing ones. New construction means more road to maintain later on, adding to the financial burden. According to the report, Tennessee has 30% of roads that are in less than good condition. Between 2004 and 2008 though, it spent $487 million on new construction and $116 million on maintainence.

Walking and cycling facilities are frequently included in new construction, and are less likely to be added to a maintainence project. Retrofitting existing streets to make them more pedestrian and cyclist friendly is sometimes difficult to impossible, depending on traffic volumes and speeds. However, where retrofitting is possible is often where significant progress can be made at minimal cost. Road diets that take one underused lane and convert it into bidirectional bike lanes are one example; if there is substantial turning traffic, simply restriping the road to have dedicated left/right turn lanes and pockets frequently means that a three lane road can handle as much traffic as a four lane, and be safer even for cars. Narrowing existing lanes to widths of 10-11 ft (termed a lane diet) sometimes would permit the striping of bike lanes. Even if bike lanes cannot be accomodated, a cycling-friendly wide outside lane of 14-15 ft may be possible. The key point is that with maintainence that needs to be done anyway, simple reconfigurations require nearly zero construction cost. With today's tight transportation budget, such savings are crucial. Portland, OR was able to take advantage of such "low-hanging fruit" in order to obtain their network for a grand total of around $60 million.

Knoxsplat.com - Knoxville Area Commuting Challenge

I just received an email from Chuck Morris detailing some of the dismal facts surrounding the commute situation in the 7 county area surrounding Knoxville. A green commuting event is scheduled for Friday, May 27 at Market Square in downtown Knoxville at noon to highlight the Knoxville Regional Transportation Planning Organization's SmartTrips program.

The dismal facts of the current situation are quoted below.
About 1/2 pound of CO2 emissions would fill up a beach ball that is 24 inches around when inflated. The average U.S. commuter generates 57 pounds of CO2 each day. That's about 100 beach balls per day for each person!

The average commute time for the 7-county Knoxville region is just over 26 miles one way. 84.5% of commuters in our region drive alone to work daily.

If just half of the region’s drive alone commuters took an alternative to driving alone for one day, at 20 miles to the gallon average, they would save nearly half a million gallons of fuel. At $4 per gallon that would represent a savings of around $2 million dollars.

Walking infrastructure - Transportation for America

A report by Transportation for America points to how there were 47,700 pedestrian fatalities during the decade 2000-2009. Such translates to around 13 deaths a day, 91 a week, or about 390 a month. As they put it, we would certainly not tolerate a jumbo jet crashing with no survivors each and every month of the year.

While it's true that many local streets are built with local money, the busier streets usually have a federal funding component, and they are the streets that tend to be busiest and most dangerous, as well as most often traveled. Currently, pedestrian funding composes a mere 1.5% of the federal transportation budget. But such is being targeted for elimination nevertheless. Eliminating that funding would only make matters worse for pedestrians, which would increase car dependency and disproportionately impact the most vulnerable. It would de facto make streets only for cars, rather than complete ones that are for all users.

Bicycling and miminum wage - an interesting point

After writing the Knoxville News Sentinel about how one can spend significantly less money by replacing a fraction of trips by bike or foot, there was a very interesting reply by an astute reader. This reader points out two facts: first, that even with high gas prices, saving $2000 a year in gas means riding a whopping 13,700 miles, which is unrealistic. Second, that one would make more money working minimum wage ($7.25/hr) with the time one spends cycling, if we factor in the differences in travel time.

Economics of Bike/Walk infrastructure followup: Portland's example

From a previous post, the $60 million figure that Portland, OR spent on cycling infrastructure over the years was mentioned, and that the cost was around the cost of a single mile of 4-lane urban freeway.

Question: strictly from an economic point-of-view, was the money well spent, especially when we consider the fact that even in Portland, cycling mode share is around 5% of all trips. The answer is a resounding yes. Here's why.

Portland - "for the equivalent cost of a single mile of freeway, we have a bike infrastructure."

Politifact Oregon has rated the claim mostly true, with the note that the mile of freeway refers to urban freeway. Due to the tight budgets of government at all levels these days, it's important that bike/ped funds be spent wisely. Being able to build or convert streets to world-class complete streets without spending a lot is doable, as Portland shows. Its high modeshare (8% of the people there refer to their bike as their primary commute vehicle, versus ~1% elsewhere) shows that the demand is there, if the infrastructure gets built.

The importance of integrating networks

For a given amount of bike/ped improvements, it's most useful to integrate the pieces into a large network, as opposed to having smaller disconnected pieces. The reason is that a larger network makes a larger number of trips possible through bike/ped, and the growth curve is non-linear, with increasing benefits for every little additional piece tacked on.

A technical illustration follows:

New Virginia anti-cul-de-sac policy

This artcle from the Washington Post describes Virginia's new rule on cul-de-sacs; any new subdivision must have "through streets linking them with neighboring subdivisions, schools and shopping areas." The article goes into quite a bit of detail on the pros and cons of the cul-de-sac setup. Basically the pros are a quieter environment for those living on it, and possibly some increase in safety since anyone who's not from a neighborhood will look out of place within it. The cons are increased traffic, which leads to increased paving costs, not to mention the isolation and car dependence such setups foster. The increased traffic gets jammed onto arterial roads, which then become unsafe and/or gridlocked. In addition, they tend to isolate neighborhoods from each other, leading to a loss of a sense of community.

The economics of oil dependence

Here's an analysis that's a rehash of an analysis I had previously posted 2-13 on bikeforums.net on the high costs associated with car dependence, purely from an economic perspective. Today being independence day, and there being many cartoons pointing out our current lack of independence from oil (FWIW, President George W. Bush said that "America is addicted to oil"), let's look at the numbers again.

Note: I would have liked to start with one such cartoon, but I cannot due to copyright restrictions.

Total number of miles driven annually in the USA - 2 trillion (2 * 10^12)

Assume that each vehicle gets an average of 20-25 miles/US gallon

So 80-100 billion gallons of gas were burned to move the cars.

If each car lasts 150,000-200,000 miles on average, that means that 10-13 million cars were "spent"

Now let's suppose that each car costs (including insurance, maintenance, registration, etc.) $15,000 to $30,000. Let's assume that gas costs $2/gal, excluding taxes - taxes are excluded because they fund the government to some degree.

So the total money spent on cars in a year is between 310 billion to 590 billion dollars. Notice how I've excluded environmental effects (e.g. pollution, sprawl) as well as the health effects of a sedentary lifestyle. If we assume that a typical family has 4 people, and a total US population is roughly 300 million people, each family spends between $4100 to $7900 every year, or $11 to $22 each and every day including weekends and holidays on such.

Of course cars have their utility. Things like traveling long distances, hauling large quantities of things, and so forth are difficult if not impossible without a car. But car dependency is a form of addiction, and is a very costly habit. Imagine if biking and walking (and mass transit!) were realistic alternatives for a majority of trips, how much money would be saved.