European countries that focus on bicycle lanes and bike paths are so far ahead of the US in the use of bicycles for transportation that any comparisons are actually laughable.
The US News & World Report compares trips by bicycle: 10% in Germany, 18% in Denmark, and 27% in The Netherlands. The US is 1%, a figure that is probably rounded up.
For “short trips” of less than 1-1/2 miles, 37% of those are made on a bike in The Netherlands compared to 2% in the US.
Tour de Fat
Those comparisons remind me of the message passed along by the Tour de Fat folks when they visited Seattle this past weekend. They consider the bicycle as a form of sustainable transportation. They even had a funeral procession for an SUV in their “Carpocalypse Now!” parade, above right.
Supporters signed up to join Team Wonderbike at a booth at Tour de Fat presented by New Belgium Brewery. You can sign up for Team Wonderbike online. All you have to do is pledge to ride your bicycle to work two days a month. So far, members have pledged to ride 931,296 miles a month.
Errands
As long as you're pledging to ride, there's the Clif-Bar 2-Mile Challenge. Noting that 40% of urban travel is 2 miles or less, the energy bar maker is challenging cyclists to ride their bikes on those errands. You can sign up at the 2-Mile Challenge website.
Just for grins, I checked my log to see how many miles I rode in July for errands. Officially, I put in 58 miles, but a lot of those were from “taking the long way home.”
More than once a 4-mile round-trip to the grocery turned into a 7- or 8-mile ride along the pipeline or an indirect loop. So what. I didn't burn any gasoline and got some good exercise.
July stats
In case anyone is keeping track, I bicycled 525 miles in July, my best month in a long time. About 204 miles of that is due to the STP. Thanks Cascade Bicycle Club.
That gives me 2,572 miles in 2008, which is ahead of the pace for my goal of a 4,000-mile year. Looking much better than last year.
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