If everyone replaced half of their short-distance auto trips with a bike or their feet, the country would save more than 20 billion gallons of gas a year, and hundreds of billions of pounds of carbon dioxide emissions.
“You can't carry a whole soccer team on a bike,” says Jim Sayer, director of the Missoula-based Adventure Cycling. “But you can carry a lot of stuff.”
In their early days, bikes brought affordable transportation to the masses. Suddenly, people of modest means could travel outside their neighborhood, taking jobs away from home and shopping in more than one location, he said.
Bikes are even credited with freeing women from cumbersome hoops and undergarments, he said.
Now, with global warming and pollution such worldwide concerns, and with gasoline supplies dwindling and costs skyrocketing, the bike could save the planet again, he said.
Bikes also could help address an American epidemic: obesity.
“I call it carbos and carbon,” he says, clicking through a progression of slides showing the weight gain of Americans, state by state.
How bikes will help with the carbos is obvious. American kids need to walk and ride bikes, get more exercise in general, he said. Some national efforts might help, including one that earmarks money in every state - $1 million in Montana - to make riding bikes to school safer.
Higher gas prices this summer might encourage more bike riding for everyone, he said.
“I talked to friends in California, and they're at $3.69 a gallon,” he said. “We're peaking. And the Middle East is producing oil at capacity. We'll have to do something.”
“We are going to see the end of cheap oil,” he said. “The more dependent we are on oil, the more mired in the Middle East we'll be. I don't think that's what people want.”
Using less fossil fuel is not just a pocketbook issue, but also a climate issue, he said, showing slides of a dry Mount Hood and disappearing glacier fields, signs of a warming climate. Missoula's average March temperatures are up from 32 or 33 degrees to about 37, “which doesn't sound like a lot, but has profound implications for the planet,” he said.
Europe is making progress, encouraging more bicycling, he said. In Copenhagen, bicyclists are surveyed every year on whether they feel safe, and steep goals for improvement are set based on the survey. France appointed a bike minister to encourage biking, and many countries - the United Kingdom, Denmark, Germany - are building connected bike paths across their land.
Numbers show the impact: In Copenhagen, 36 percent of work trips are done on bike, and in Germany, the number is 12 percent. Missoula's is 5 percent, compared with a national average of 1 percent, he said.
“If we don't get our acts together, we can't tell other people to get their act together,” he said.
Sayer said he'd like Missoula to endorse street designs that incorporate cars, walkers and bikers, especially in the urban center, such as the university area, downtown and West Broadway.
Connect bike paths to each other, to create a large network across the town and county, he suggests. Connected trails encourage more people to ride.
Also, offer incentives and provide more bike lanes and bike parking, he said. It's the “I” in “ALFIE,” an acronym that summarizes how to promote biking: Attitude, Laws, Facilities, Incentives, Enforcement.
Besides, biking is just plain fun, he said.
“People say that it is a way to connect with your surroundings, whether the air on your face or what you hear,” he said. “It's highly social: You can smile and wave at people.”
Reporter Mea Andrews can be reached at 523-5246 or at mandrews@missoulian.com
A wheel good time
“Bike Walk Commuter Party: Making Connections in the Missoula Valley,” 5-7 p.m. Friday, is a place to meet with fellow “self-propelled” commuters and to learn about some of the bike-friendly initiatives around Missoula. It's at Free Cycles Community Bike Shop, 732 S. First St. W.
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