Are You a Savvy Cyclist?

Revenue Canada lost a court case against bike courier Wayne Scott and now allows C$ 17.00 per day without receipts. In the UK, couriers can deduct £6.50 per day. In the States, the courts have ruled:

"Expenditures for food, the "fuel" for all human activities, whether or not business related, are considered inherently personal in nature."

However, the US has very recently introduced a bicycle commuter tax credit.

Using a bike for transportation can help you lose weight and improve your overall health. The health benefits of regular aerobic exercise are well known. Depending on your riding style and local road conditions, you could easily burn 600 calories an hour through brisk cycling. Most bike commuters report losing 15 to 20 pounds during their first year in the saddle without changing their eating habits.

More on TreeHugger
Ride a Bike to Work for These 5 Health Benefits

And it isn't just the cash that is spent, it is also the pollution that is saved. During its lifetime, on the road, each car produces another 1.3 billion cubic yards of polluted air and scatters an additional 40 pounds of worn tire particles, brake debris and worn road surface into the atmosphere.

Calculate your own impact with a bike commute calculator.

Yes, an astounding 16% of people in Portland use their bikes for their basic transportation. in Boulder, Colorado, it is 14%. In New York, the number of individuals cycling to work increased by 35% when the city started adding lots of bike lanes in 2002.

George Will recently wrote in Newsweek:

"Where to start? Does LaHood really think Americans were not avid drivers before a government highway program "promoted" driving? Does he think 0.01 percent of Americans will ever regularly bike to work?"

And while it is true that nationally the percentage of people who commute by bikes is still small, ( .38 ) when cities go out of their way to promote cycling and provide a safe cycling environment the numbers go way up.

Is cycling safe? It depends how you look at the statistics; if you look at injuries per mile traveled, bikes probably don't look that safe. But if you look at the amount of time spent doing the activity, the Exposure Hour, it might be different. For example, driving a motorcycle has a death rate of 8.8 per million hours of exposure. The average of all causes of death is 1.53 fatalities per million hours of exposure. Passenger cars have a rate of .47 fatalities per million hours. Bikes has a rate of .26/million hours.

According to the study by failure accessors Exponent, bikes have a fatality rate of half of that of cars. In some ways that makes sense; cars go a lot faster. But others have questioned this study and suggest that cycling has a death rate that is higher than driving, as much as twice as high. But it is still a fraction of that from riding a motorcycle or scooter.

More on Bike safety:
For Bicylists, There is Safety in Numbers
Physically Separated Bike Lanes: Concrete is Better Than Cops
Freakonomics on Bike Safety

A gallon of gasoline contains about 31,000 calories, and "Bicycles can travel at least 10 times farther on a given amount of energy than the most efficient car," according to Nicholas Goddard, a graduate of Duke University who decided to see just how far he could bike on 31,000 calories. He rode the 633 miles over eight days, eating a wide range of foods, including "two Gatorades, five ham-and-cheese sandwiches, a steak burrito from Cosmic Cantina, a glass of sangria, a quesadilla, chips and salsa, and a pint of beer."

From TreeHugger.

According to the New England Journal of Medicine, "Riders with helmets had an 85 percent reduction in their risk of head injury and an 88 percent reduction in their risk of brain injury. We conclude that bicycle safety helmets are highly effective in preventing head injury. Helmets are particularly important for children, since they suffer the majority of serious head injuries from bicycling accidents."

Helmet laws like those in effect in Australia levy a substantial cost on healthcare systems because savings from fewer head injuries pale in comparison to the costs incurred by decreases in cycling-people were getting less exercise.

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