Birthday Express

This week i enjoyed a friend's birthday dinner. I also enjoyed the trip there. For a 19km journey (including through the city in peak hour) it took just 26 minutes on the express train. Friends (including the guest of honour) spent as long as that stuck in traffic.

For the record it also results in about 1/9th of the greenhouse emissions according to the Queensland Rail Emissions Calculator.

Cleaner, Greener, Smarter

One of the parties in the upcoming state election had this great animation on their website.


I think it's a great example of how the non-car option can be better in so many ways.

"A train every 10 minutes transports the same number of people as a freeway. Cleaner. Greener. Smarter."

No Regrets

Like the t-shirt i showed you the other week, i saw this one online. It caught my eye because it's a very similar design to the great one i have.


I think it's a good summary of the advantages of going car free. "No fuel tank. No emissions. No oil wars. No regrets."

What Bicycles Produce

Was playing around with images and created this little pic from a We Love Cycling poster.


I thought it was a nice depiction of the fun of riding, rather than the pollution of cars. :)

Bike-Share Improvements

This week Brisbane's CityCycle bike-share scheme announced some improvements. Most noteable is the 400 free helmets at bike stations (very helpful for the spontaneous user), the reduction in a daily subscription, and the introduction of a weekly subscription.


Meanwhile, in a piece called Ride For Your Life, experts worked out that (in addition to convenience, exercise, reduced pollution and reduced traffic congestion) Barcelona's bike-share scheme is also saving lives.

Pushy Pushbikers ;) ... (not)

Great satirical piece by Danny Katz, pretending to be the rant of an angry motorist, but actually showing the benefits of cycling (and perhaps how motorists could be more considerate). Here are some small excerpts:

Cyclists don't seem to care about road safety either. Sometimes when I open my driver's-side door without looking, a cyclist will ride up really close and try to rip off the door with their upper-body - I don't understand this extreme hostility towards us!

OK, maybe they're slightly more fit and healthy, but do they have to taunt us so cruelly by wiggling their sexy pert buttocks in our faces as they ride by? It just makes us feel insecure and unattractive, sitting in our cars, our arse-flab dribbling over the edge of the seat into the little gap where the handbrake is.

Pushy pushbikers: it's time they showed a little consideration for us poor victimised petrol-dependent parking-overcharged traffic-jammed ozone-depleting beanbag-bummed motorists.

Bike Riding And Well-Being

We know riding a bike can be better than car-driving. But sometimes there are obstacles to changing our habits. Some of these obstacles are all in our head.

One of these psychological barriers is concerns about health and safety. I think it is mostly an illusion created by over-protective laws. After all, if it requires a helmet it must be unsafe mustn't it?

But i've just read a European study measured the effect in "life years" gained or lost. Increased exposure to pollution (of cars) caused a loss of 0.8-40 days. Traffic accidents were an average loss of 5-9 days.

The health benefits gained from physical exercise were at least 10 times larger - a gain of 3-14 months. Or as the study concluded:

On average, the estimated health benefits of cycling were substantially larger than the risks relative to car driving for individuals shifting their mode of transport.

And that's just the personal benefits. Obviously society also benefits from the reduction in air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions.

Gold Coast Comparison

For my trip to the Gold Coast, i decided to compare the emissions of driving to that of taking the train. Apart from creating 8 times less greenhouse gas, it was probably also cheaper, with a trip down costing me just $6.93. As an added bonus i got to read a fair chunk of a book i've meaning to read for ages.


Try it youself, at the Queensland Rail Emission Calculator.

Highway From Hell

This is from Edward Burtynsky's "Oil" series of photographs. Reminded me of the Age of Stupid quote that we seem to be designing our communities to be impossible to navigate by any method other than the car (the most polluting form of transport).

Good Call

So if you've been watching the Tour de France, you've probably seen an ad for Bike Exchange. I checked out their website, and came across a nice line that summed up cycling...

In an increasingly obese and polluted world where the roads are congested, cycling tackles all three issues.

More Benefits

The Rapid Active & Affordable Transport Alliance (RAATA) recently launched a report entitled "Investing in Sustainable Transport".

At the launch, ACF diector Don Henry spoke of benefits in terms of reduced greenhouse emissions and less addiction to oil. Heart Foundation CEO Dr Lyn Roberts pointed out the health benefits of active transport (cycling, walking).

More than 16,000 Australians are estimated to die prematurely each year, mostly from heart disease and stroke, because they are insufficiently physically active. Physical inactivity also costs the community an estimated $13.8 billion a year ... We need to make the healthier transport choices – walking, cycling, public transport – the easier choices. And we need to replan our communities to promote physical activity – not obesity.

Matt O’Brien (CEO of Diabetes Australia) had a similar view.

Active community environments that encourage walking, bike riding and incidental exercise can help reduce the number of people who are overweight and obese. People who are overweight or obese are at a much higher risk of developing type 2 diabetes. This is of grave concern in Australia as the number of new cases of diabetes each year would fill the Melbourne Cricket Ground

Bless Our Bikes

A friend emailed me about this one - a church that decided to have a Bicycle Blessing ceremony for the cycling community.


The prayers of blessing included:

In a world groaning under the excesses of consumption, we acknowledge the inherent goodness of non-motorized human powered transportation and give thanks for the simple beauty of the bicycle... Bless those who choose to not drive to work and those for whom driving isn’t even an option... Keep us safe as we ride.
God of life, hear our prayer. Amen

Benefits Package

Often i write here about the benefits of being car-free. Today i noticed the footer on an email from the people at Ecomotion Concepts.


Sums it up nicely - i reckon.

Bike Stats

Last time, i showed how popular bikes are becoming. Today i found some more stats about bikes:

- about 100 bikes can be made from the materials used for one car
- bikes use 1/50th of the energy of a car
- bikes use 1/20th of the parking space
- a new bike costs around 1% of a new car

and while these are all really great, i reckon they're only part of the reason why people are getting onto bikes.

Wheely Popular

Spotted this graph of bike and car production.


Car production is increasing, but many more people are discovering the economy and exercise of the good old bicycle.

If Cars Were Drugs

Continuing my reading from yesterday, i found that each year..

1,700 Australians die in car accidents
4,000 Australians are disabled by car accidents
2,400 die of air pollutants (which cars produce half of)
48,000 people are hospitalised from transport accidents

Possibly because i used to work in pharmaceuticals, i wondered "If cars were a new drug, would the government even allow them into the market?"

Catching the Train

I read today that in NSW, the number of people catching the train to work has increased by 120,000.

The survey found that more people are choosing public transport to be more enviromentally friendly. The transport minister observed that switching to public transport vastly reduces emissions, and acknowledged that more needs to be done to enable more people to join this trend.