Angela Fields

English 1010

11/23/2015

Project Cycle

As communities grow so too do the burdens of motorized transport on its citizens. In my proposal I would like to show that biking can be a better solution and how my plan helps those that wish to travel green. Beyond those that would like to take part of the project this proposal should interest those that care about their health and air pollution. The plan I will introduce to these growing communities is called Project Cycle. The idea is through donation of bikes and supplies we will create a loan program to people in local areas. Project Cycle will supply them with road safe bikes to use to replace their automobiles for a means of travel to and from work. We will also use the supplies to create bike racks to safeguard the bikes (and anyone else’s bike), utilizing them in an accessible area in front of their workplaces.

 Some may ask ‘how is biking more convenient than driving’ and I would retort ‘how is spending extra time stuck in traffic, looking for parking spaces, getting gas or spending an extra hour a day to work out in a gym any more convenient?’ These arguments don’t even delve into the inconvenience of car maintenance, tag renewal, registration, extra taxes for road repair and the possibility of inactive health risks or those from polluted air. Just think of how ‘red air’ days are for people in areas that have to check for it daily in order to leave their houses. How convenient is that for them? If we introduce the hard evidence of biking’s positive impacts more in our school systems, I believe more would learn the benefits far outweigh any “inconvenience.”  Project Cycle can contribute to city planning by supporting bicycling and provide more accessible biking features to existing community structures. This will help communities lessen their air pollution which in turn improves the overall health of its citizens, not only due to lack of exercise but also poor air.

The reasons I tell the stories here is to convey how biking helped me as a person as a means of exercise for both body and mind, and how I lessen my carbon footprint by riding. If we were to all bike instead of drive, we would lessen pollution significantly and be a lot healthier. I use Boise as an example for an entire city dedicated to strengthening these concepts. It’s not hard to bike versus drive and in a lot of ways it’s easier. I will tell how I was part of this city’s ideals and hope to bring them here to Utah and elsewhere.

I am not alone in my tales of first rides and first falls but I will tell you that it never ended there for me and shouldn’t for anyone.  My journey of how I ended up in Boise started in Maryland where I was born. There I used my bike to pedal off eighty pounds of laziness as my means to get to and from both of my jobs and from the gym. An hour each way gives you the time to think about all the things you’d like to, on a peaceful ride through the country side. After one such brainstorm session, my five month journey alone over eight states and one province was plotted. Landing me in Boise, Idaho for nine months.

 Never before have I ever felt so at home with a place and I couldn’t tell you if it was its charm as a city or the intimacy I felt after biking through its streets. Maybe a bit of both. Despite the fact that I brought my bike to Boise via car, I hope that I lessened my carbon impact, when I was never parted from it thereafter. Even in winter biking to and fro, the crisp air filling my lungs and blood pumping to warm the body with others huddled inside. I watched everything as I rode the quiet surroundings, serene in their season. Alone I may have been riding around the city but together with my bike as always before, it never really felt like I was.

To be honest I don’t consider any moment lost as the hours stretched on, I felt as if I were living 200% of every breath and every inch worth of every mile. If there was a day that passed that I couldn’t bike due to weather or situation, I would do more on an exercise bike or feel a nearly inconceivable sickness from my lack of activity. The goat heads tried to hinder me at times by popping my tire tubes. My local bike shop always had my back, only a five minute walk around the corner. Eventually I stuck it to the stickers and bought an upgrade, puncture proof tires made of Kevlar. The same as bullet proof vests and I never paused due to popping again!

In Boise, the city has something similar to what we have here along the Jordan River but with major differences. The city calls it the green belt. Running alongside the Boise River, the green belt never crosses a motorized roadway (nor does it allow any motorized transport). The city has built bridges over and under them, for the path that is only as wide as one lane of most streets. It was small enough to weave in and out of the communities for convenience and for scenic views, but wide enough to support the entirety of the communities that wished to be part of a more practical greener transportation system. “To your left!” we called out to walkers, boarders, skaters, or other bikers to indicate we were about to pass them. Parks are embedded with the path on either side making easy access to local gatherings and happenings. Stretching the length of the town, the path makes a trip to downtown not an ordeal but an exercise for the mind, body and soul that would brighten anyone’s day.

Listening to birds, bugs and the sound of the river waters running carelessly over the river rocks one scarcely has need of a music player. The noise and bustle of the city, though it is literally intertwined with the path, is nearly absent from its appearance and atmosphere. Just off the paths are bike racks nuzzled into every business setting, inviting you to come in and worry not for your companion, like it may have been with horses and hitching posts in older days.  Biking more often to the stores, a backpack or basket full, was usually all one needed to transport goods. In the summer, spring, and fall months it is not too uncommon to see swimmers in the ponds, fly fishers along the edges or floaters hanging onto one another laughing in the glistening sun winding along with the river currents.

            I can see the communities and people of Utah and elsewhere also benefiting from riding bikes often as it is done in Boise. My story highlights how Boise and I set the pace of the ideals we hope will roll into every town and mobile system everywhere. As Boise prides on their web page, “The tree-lined pathway follows the river through the heart of the city and provides scenic views, wildlife habitat and pedestrian access to many of the city's popular riverside parks. The Greenbelt also serves as an alternative transportation route for commuters (“Greenbelt Overview”). Stories like this could grow and be shared in a mutual accomplishment that will bring pride to the hearts of any community.

Bill Nye is an example to show how others have this similar vision of city infrastructures incorporating more bicycles as transportation instead of motorized vehicles. Bill Nye “the science guy,” best known for his Disney series by the same title, appears as a really tall guy on a bike wearing a helmet. Not only does Bill Nye sometimes personally use a bike for transportation, he also used his bike during his show to demonstrate the distance between planets. Bill Nye is also a science educator, comedian, television presenter, actor, writer, scientist, and former mechanical engineer.

He once said, “Bicycling is a big part of the future. It has to be. There’s something wrong with a society that drives a car to work out in a gym” (Nye). He teases people that it is not sensible and is harmful to the planet to use a car when you could instead use a means of exercise to go exercise. That the idea of using such a costly means of transport is illogical when the process of going can be just as engaging as why a person is going. Cities all over the world have begun to build systems to drive people towards this better way of transportation not only for exercising, but some places (areas in china for instance) frown upon other motorized means due to their high overall cost.

            Bill Nye talks in a video made by Big Think about what he believes to be ideal structures in the ‘City of the Future’. He speaks of weatherproof tunnels that could have the wind blowing in both direction so that riders would always have a tailwind and how cost efficient they would be compared to current road infrastructures.  He tells that roads are like bridges over sand and to put the weight of a car on it verses a bike, the bridge needs to be thicker as well as maintained more often to support the car. Thereby it becomes more expensive for the city and individuals. In the future space is also a growing concern for a rising population and the amount we waste on parking lots and roadways is an area that will have to be managed more wisely.

 I think if our city planners adapted our travel systems more for bicycles instead of cars, not only personal expense such as car maintenance, registration tax and gasoline would be saved, but also tax base expenses that are put into current road maintenance and construction. Beyond the cost benefit of these road improvements so too would the environmental benefit from the cost in materials we take from it to make roads and the cars that drive on them. With more structures such as the tunnels to assist us getting to places time, cost and space could be saved, discrediting those that say biking takes longer than driving. I agree that bikes are the future and though an entire overhaul of our current transportation system may seem daunting to some, Project Cycle can help apply then modify small changes to get our wheels rolling in the right direction.

When I started to lose weight by biking to the gym, I saw firsthand the irony of Bill Nye’s statement and discovered many other benefits by riding there. The energy level, focus, determination, breath and the money I saved by biking instead of driving all greatly increased. At times the long commute into town did catch me in some precarious weather, occasions which may have slowed me down. However if we instead work towards Bill Nye’s and my vision that would address that problem with the weather proof tunnels, instead of paving and repaving space wasting roads and fixing crumbling bridges, more would join us on the bike path. Bill Nye may think himself ‘nutty’ having way out there ideas with his tunnels over roads vision, but as he argues it can be done. It has already started to be seen in cities that recognize that bicycling is not ‘a trend’ it’s currently the most viable and sustainable option for transportation.

In the article, "The Association of Ambient Air Pollution and Physical Inactivity in the United States,” Jennifer Roberts, Jameson Voss and Brandon Knight from the Department of Preventive Medicine and Biometrics have done extensive studies of the health risks of inactivity and air pollution. This article shows how active transport and transportation structures can improve upon these risks. The article postulates that, “those interventions which improve physical activity and reduce air pollution such as transportation interventions will have both primary and secondary benefits” (Roberts et. al. 9). What they say here is that along with the initial health benefits, increased activity also decreases the pollution generated by other means of travel. If we begin to see more people participating in walking and bicycling modes of transport, the decline in these health risks will be quantifiable and correlate directly in increased public health.

Beyond that article other professional planners such as Jacob Larsen, Ahmed El-Geneidy and Farhana Yasmin from the School of Urban Planning at McGill University agree that planning to encourage bicycling and active transport is in a community’s best interest. All three have taught and extensively researched these more practical design plans and how keeping active transport in mind when engineering road systems they give long time benefits to local residence. They write in article, “Beyond the Quarter Mile: Re-examining Travel Distances by Active Transportation,” that, “The benefits of active transportation are manifold:  while potentially reducing traffic congestion, human-powered transportation improves personal health, enhances quality of life, and has been linked to economic vitality in urban settings” (Larsen et. al. 71). In this they state again how these included designs for alternative modes of transportation positively affect many aspects of concerns for city engineers and civilians alike. Including these features that promote biking in your local area from the start shows how simple alterations and considerations for it scales higher than just as a personal act of change and improvement. It is also evident as a leading change that will elevate an entire areas standard of living.

Project Cycle helps with some of the first stages of this, providing people with bikes at no cost to them that are willing to use them to get around. In addition the project will start to put bike racks in front of local businesses for people to use as bike parking. For every promise we get towards our project and actively participating person that starts to ride a bike is one less car on the road.

Over 12 years writer Kellyn S. Betts has published in EHP and Environmental Science & Technology writing about the hazards, environmental contaminants and solutions to these environmental issues. In her article, “Big Biking Payoff: Alternative Transportation Could Net Midwest over $8 Billion,” she tells how studies revealed that if people biked instead of drove for trips under five miles there is a significant cost reduction for both health and air pollution problems. It states, “Short trips contribute disproportionately to air pollution because a large fraction of toxic automotive emissions, including 25% of the volatile organic compounds (VOCs) and 19% of the primary fine particulate matter (PM[sub2.5] ), are generated in the first few miles of travel before pollution control devices have reached their operating temperatures” (Betts A34). What it means here is that even if one needs to drive at times if someone can make the choice to instead bike within this distance some of the greatest benefits from that choice are perceivable in the truth of car designs and how they run. On average a person can bike eleven to twelve mph. If a person biked to and from the max distance of five miles the time spent doing so is slightly less than the time a day doctors recommend a person works out to maintain physical health. That would be like killing two birds with one stone, first to get to where you want to go in not much more time than normal and second, to get the exercise one needs to remain healthy. The more people take these facts given by writers such as Kellyn Betts as initiatives towards better city design plans, the more we all begin to see the positive aftereffects.

Project Cycle will raise part of the necessary tools and human drive to convert this failing and harmful transportation system into one that gives back to the people that participate, changing communities’ often unwilling and stunting misconception of practical travel into one that works. Pollution caused by our transportation system affects all of us. By building on the ideas at the core of Project Cycle, these and other issues will be addressed and collaboratively worked on within city designs. One breath of effort towards this greener goal today can help everyone breathe easier tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Works Cited

Betts, Kellyn S. "Big Biking Payoff: Alternative Transportation Could Net Midwest Over $8

            Billion." Environmental Health Perspectives 120.1 (2012): A34. Academic Search

Premier. Web. 27 Nov. 2015.

“Greenbelt Overview.” cityofboise.org.  Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Larsen, Jacob, Ahmed El-Geneidy, and Farhana Yasmin. "Beyond The Quarter Mile: Re-

            Examining Travel Distances By Active Transportation." Canadian Journal Of Urban

            Research19.1 Supp (2010): 70-88. Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Nye, Bill. “The City of the Future.” Big Think.com. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.

Roberts, Jennifer D., Jameson D. Voss, and Brandon Knight. "The Association of Ambient Air

            Pollution and Physical Inactivity in the United States." Plos ONE 9.3 (2014): 1-10.

            Academic Search Premier. Web. 16 Nov. 2015.