Last week we wrote to you about efforts to promote more biking and walking to school. This week
Margherita Pryor, a founding member of the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition -- an organization established to promote and enable bicycling as a healthy, enjoyable, efficient and environmentally friendly mode of transportation in Rhode Island -- tells about the many costs and consequences of our over-reliance on automobiles.

What do the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, the White House, and the Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition have in common?

Simple. They all want us to get out of our cars and on to our feet, our bikes, our skates .... anything, in fact, that moves under human muscle power.

The reason is equally simple. Numerous studies(1) including very recent ones by the White House Task Force on Childhood Obesity and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control, report that we are literally driving ourselves to the poorhouse and ill-health. They warn that our sedentary, badly fed lifestyle has become more costly, more time-consuming, and more damaging to our health than ever before. And while the factors underlying this situation are complex, we know these gloomy outcomes do share at least one common source -- our love affair with our cars.

Today's transportation system is extremely expensive, both for individual families and for society as a whole. Supporting our car-based transportation habit is the second largest expense for American households -- ahead even of food, clothing, and health care -- and as the studies confirm, even adds to the cost of health care. (2)

Data from 2005 showed that nationally we spent more than $900 billion on vehicles, fuel and other vehicle-related needs, accounting for 17 percent of total household expenditures -- more than households spent on food and clothing combined. And these figures pre-dated the recent oil price roller coaster. The more automobile-dependent the location, the more money likely spent on transportation. Further, these costs do not factor in the billions more spent by businesses and public agencies on the care and feeding of cars, as well as coping with the impacts of cars.

For not only are we pouring money into our cars, we're also throwing away time. Again from 2005, studies showed that the average rush hour traveler in an urban area spends 38 hours in traffic delays, imposing large economic costs to the tune of 4.2 billion lost hours of time and 2.9 billion gallons of wasted fuel. This is an estimated $78 billion drain on the economy! Even in little Rhode Island, our share of that drain was $343 million in congestion costs. And of course this estimate doesn't account for the reduced quality of life, or the moments we could have spent with our families and friends.

Nor does it account for the environmental costs. The carbon dioxide we produce in the Northeast, primarily by driving and by burning fossil fuels, makes us the 7th highest contributor of greenhouse gas in the world!And in Rhode Island, a quarter of the state's emissions come from vehicle use alone.(3)

And finally, it's not only municipal and household costs and greenhouse gases that are up. So are rates of asthma, obesity, and diabetes. In Rhode Island, 57 percent of adults are overweight or obese, an increase of 66 percent since 1990. Worse, our kids are following the same alarming trajectory -- one in five children entering kindergarten in our state are obese, facing a lifetime of impacts on their physical and mental health.

And these effects are happening now -- 60 percent of obese Rhode Island children ages 5 to 10 years old already have at least one cardiovascular disease risk factor.(4) Medical experts relate these effects directly to the increasing lack of exercise in our lives, some of which is due to our car-dominated communities and landscapes. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control found this relationship so compelling they have created an entire program to encourage built environments that encourage regular physical activity.

The Rhode Island Bicycle Coalition wants to change these scenarios by advocating for bicycling as cost-effective, healthy, enjoyable, and environmentally friendly transit.

Rhode Island has an immediate advantage in the number of paved bike paths in the state -- 50 miles already, with 40 more miles in various stages of design or preparation for construction. We expect to be the first state to complete our portion of the East Coast Greenway, a magnificent route that will run from Calais, Maine to Key West, Florida. Our citizens routinely support bond issues for greenway development, and we devote 5.4 percent of our federal transportation dollars to bike and pedestrian programs -- the highest allocation in the country!

But while welcome, this number can be misleading. Any map will show that our bike paths are viewed by users and transportation officials as primarily recreational. The Blackstone, East Bay, and Washington Secondary routes all come to the edge of Providence and disappear. Although the newly opened Woonasquatucket Greenway is a welcome change in that it actually enters Providence and proceeds to the heart of downtown, it too is mostly on streets without marked bike lanes and adequate buffers from adjacent traffic. Poor or missing signage and routes along bike-unfriendly streets confuse cyclists and discourage routine commuting. The absence of secure hitches (how many bikes can be locked to a parking sign?) and facilities for changing also are barriers to more bicycle use.

So it's no surprise that bikes make up a mere two tenths of one percent (0.2 percent) of all modes for trips to work.  Even compared to the not so good national news (only 0.90 percent of trips to work are on bikes), this is astonishingly small. Given the high correlation between compact development -- as we have in Rhode Island's cities and towns -- and opportunities for biking and walking, we should do much, much better.

The average trip length here is 8.37 miles, takes 24.03 minutes, and -- in 80 percent of cases -- is in a single-occupancy vehicle.(5) On a bicycle at 12 mph, those trips would take roughly 40 minutes! And that's door to door without the hassle and cost of parking and the thousands of dollars annually to operate and maintain a car. For the usual errand trips, the distance is even less, and the incentives more, for using a bicycle.

Still, in 2009, only 13% of students rode a bike or walked to school; a stunning 44% came by car. Parents cite many barriers to putting their kids on bikes, including not only distance to school, traffic-related danger, and weather, but also fear of crime and even prohibitive school policies.

So what can be done to increase bicycle (and pedestrian) commuting?

First: The state's long-range transportation plan sets policy and the future agenda for how we get around in Rhode Island.Backed up by the CDC, U.S. Department of Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood has expressed amazing support for cycling and "active transportation," and backed it up with funding as well as words. Let's make sure our own DOT takes advantage of these resources by setting measurable goals and targets to increase bicycle use.

That means identifying the numbers by which we want ridership to increase and the steps we will take to generate that increase, including providing secure storage facilities; building and/or striping separate bike lanes and developing efficient routes; and implementing bicycle safety programs and enforcing traffic rules that protect cyclists and pedestrians. This is a key early step: in 2007 alone, 14,000 children were injured and 300 killed by cars. There is a "safety in numbers" trend, in which roadways generally become safer for everyone when more people are out walking and biking.

Second: Let's make the true costs of our transportation policies transparent so that we recognize how much the different modes cost (including all those externalities such as pollution, disease, and the physical dismemberment of our neighborhoods), and can consider the trade-offs among them and who ends up paying.

And last: Let's advocate for a transportation system focused on moving people not cars.

The solution is in our own hands --- or more accurately, on our own feet!

Pedal on Rhode Island!