My wife is a more regular reader of the No Impact Man blog than I am. She often reads it, summarizes it, and converts it down into a nice MTV translation for me. Many of the articles, like this current one, just make too much sense. So much sense, that it’s easy for me to file the knowledge away and say that I’ll get to do something about it, someday.
Before I heard about the No Impact Man guy, I had come up with this plan to become the Emissionless Man. The Emissionless Man materialized as a thing-to-do on my spreadsheet, but not in real life. I kept driving my car everywhere. And I never told anyone about the name, because, well, it sounds like I was out to curb my flatulence problem.
After Janna (aka. my wife… I really like that I have a wife, but that’s a different blog post) told me about the No Impact Man guy, I decided to get off my butt. I bought a nice urban friendly bike (virtually puncture proof tires, old and unappetizing to thieves, extremely durable, cheap to replace parts) from my friend Matt. After that, I started biking almost everywhere. Biking to meet my friends at Santana Row, to the office, to dinners, to my Janna’s parents, to parties, to meetings… almost everywhere.
Please know that I have not, and do not, bike everywhere. I carpool with Janna, sometimes I borrow her car. Sometimes I walk, sometimes I run. During a long day’s bike ride I started thinking about the positive impact of bicycling.
There’s got to be a more eloquent formula for writing this up, but here’s the roughly what I thought up, and then confirmed through a tiny bit of research.
For every mile bicycled that would have been traveled in a vehicle
- If done on a sunny day, your body generates Vitamin D
- Approximately 1/28th of a gallon of refined gasoline will be saved
- Due to imperfect conversion techniques, approximately 1/12th of a gallon of crude oil will be saved
- Burn approximately 13 Calories, burning fat, building muscle
- Time saved by performing aerobic exercise outside of a gym
- Endorphins
- [Insert every other good thing you hear about exercise]
What I hope people realize is that by biking to logical places, like the gym you work out at, to work (especially if you have a shower in your office space), to the store for menial items, there is a net positive impact on your life and everyone around you.
The same idea goes for walking, running, skateboarding… any human powered vehicle you can think of.