5 Fabulous and Fun Reasons to Ride your Bike at Her Active Life

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5 Fabulous and Fun Reasons to Ride your Bike

Posted May 2, 2008 at 02:15 PM by Martinique Haller

Section: Her Fitness, Athletics, Her Health, Her Motivation

bike sign With this first post, Her Active Life welcomes Martinique Haller as our new staff writer. In this article, she talks with joy about the reasons to become a bike rider even if your city doesn’t exactly make it easy on you. In future columns, she will be talking about fresh, performance apparel, the difference between cruisers and mountain bikes and the many and varied reasons that biking is such a healthy and enjoyable activity. If there is something you have a question about, drop us a comment. Hopefully you’ll be dusting off your old ten speed in no time. Happy Trails!

I live in Chicago, a city that is proud of the headway it has made with making streets safe for bikers. Cyclists have a lot of support from their bike-riding mayor who has helped create Chicago’s Bike 2015 plan with the “vision to make bicycling an integral part of daily life in Chicago.” In fact, Chicago was voted the best big city in the United States for bicycling, according to the November 2001 issue of Bicycling magazine. Chicago has put in bike lanes, has free bike valet at city events in the summer, and sponsors a bike-to-work commuter challenge every summer with prizes and other incentives. The city is trying. It’s up against a car culture that is so thick it has barely scraped its surface.

Although, we are a long way from Amsterdam where parents throw a few kids on their bikes and go without helmets. In Amsterdam, they ride through streets positively strewn with locked-up bikes and overrun with cyclists in motion, young women riding in high heels, two people out on the town with one sitting on the rear rack, white-haired riders carrying groceries, and everyone with toned, muscled calves

I’ll admit that biking in a big city is scary. Cars come too close, sometimes on purpose. Other drivers simply fail to see a cyclist, and often times you find yourself on busier roads than you’d like and you try to out ride the fear. So, why ride? Why be forced to tail a bus and breathe in its exhaust? Why try to keep your anger in check when a driver nearly runs you over to prove a point? Why arrive to work a little bit sweaty? There are so many reasons.

(1) It’s green. I don’t need to supply figures to prove that biking is easier on the environment than driving, even easier that taking public transit. There is no gas involved, no exhaust, and no emissions other than human sweat.
(2) It feels really good. No matter what the reason is for riding, it always feels good. Riding to work in the morning on a beautiful day can make work a little more palatable. Riding over to a barbecue on a Sunday makes the barbecue that much tastier. It brings a smile to your face. It just does. This might be why people in Amsterdam seem to be so happy.
(3) It saves money. There is no expensive sky-rocketing gas to buy. You can even avoid paying for the bus or train! Yes, you have to maintain your bike but that is nothing to what you pay to maintain your car.
(4) Cycling is safe. No, really. According to the Bicycle Almanac, 16.5 cyclists per million are killed in traffic accidents each year compared with 19.9 per million of car passengers and cyclists make up only 2% of all traffic injuries. So you’re safer on a bike than in a car – even in a big tank of an SUV. (Also, note that SUVs are two times more likely to kill a passenger in another car during a crash than a smaller car and they are deadlier to child pedestrians than smaller cars. ) I think it’s safe to say that a cyclist almost never kills a driver or a pedestrian.
(5) It is great exercise. Enough said.

References
http://www.biketraffic.org/content.php?id=1253_0_11_0
http://www.biketraffic.org/studentbikes/
http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.html