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those who watched the most TV—an admittedly Herculean average of seven hours or more per day—were 60 percent more likely to die during the course of the project than those who limited it to an hour or less.2
In more or less any industrialized country, the health incentives for cycling massively outweigh the perils, and provably so.
Every year about seven hundred Americans die on bikes, a figure that could and should be significantly lower.6 But over the same period at least two hundred thousand of their compatriots die from conditions linked to a lack of physical activity, notably cardiovascular problems and cancer.
Study after study has shown that people who cycle regularly are less prone to obesity, diabetes, strokes, heart disease, and various cancers.
It calculated that inactivity causes between 6 and 10 percent of cases of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and breast and colon cancers, killing around 5.3 million people a year, about the same number as tobacco.13
The official WHO threshold of being physically active for adults is doing 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week, or half an hour a day, five days a week.
A fifth of all people say they haven’t walked more than twenty minutes even once in the past year.
Justin Varney and his team at Public Health England are currently trying to persuade people to do just thirty minutes of moderate exercise a week. That might seem remarkably little—just walking half a mile three times a week would do it—but even this modest effort can bring impressive results.
If we can get the entire population doing at least thirty minutes a week, which is not scary for people, that would have a significant impact on the burden of ill health in this country.”
In a first for human history, significantly more people are now dying from eating too much than too little.
overweight people who exercise tend to be far more healthy than their slim, inactive peers.
Even after adjusting for diet and other factors, men who acquired a motor vehicle for the first time gained on average nearly four pounds of weight more than those who didn’t.26 It seems that cars make you fatter.
this is based around the idea that people are far more likely to be physical if the exercise is integrated into their everyday lives rather than being an artificial extra.
If you’re going at a moderate pace, you’re doing your moderate physical activity, which is fine, but it’s the vigorous which will provide you with much greater protection by time.”
One common problem with walking is that it needs to be fairly brisk to count even as moderate exercise, a point many people miss.
Anne Lusk points to studies showing US dog owners actually tend to weigh more than the national average. “People have been saying for a long time, ‘Gee, I’m going for a walk to the dog park, that’s good,’” she says. “Your dog is exercising in the dog park. You’re not. You’re walking slowly, or standing and talking to friends. You’re at one MET.”
it found those who biked to work were 40 percent less likely to die during the study. Forty percent. If you tried to skew the odds so much your way in a casino, they’d throw you out for cheating.
while the idea of physically inactive people dying young is a worry to government ministers, it’s the thought of the inactive ones who stay alive for decades that really keeps them awake at night.
“Current costs of providing healthcare cover for a physically inactive ageing population are not sustainable.”
The key point is this: the less active someone is when they’re younger, the more likely it is they will eventually need expensive assistance, such as visiting nurses or a place in a residential home.
Given all this, are countries where a lot of people cycle invariably healthier? The short answer seems to be a qualified yes.
Studies show that even regular, vigorous exercise doesn’t completely insulate you from the perils of sitting down for long periods.
even if you’re a regular cyclist and you sit down at home to watch a couple of hours of TV in the evening, he’d recommend you get up every twenty minutes or so, to make a cup of tea or just stretch your legs.
So should we be worried that the people who know the most about the perils of inactivity are themselves a bit nervy if they sit down for more than about half an hour? Yes, we probably should.
“One of the issues with physical activity is it has to have this coordinated response across sectors. It’s not public health that builds the roads or the parks, or puts physical education in the schools. It takes this larger consensus to get things to happen in multiple areas of our lives.”42
“So many interests need to be convinced that investing in cycling is good for them. Consider that we’ve known about tobacco as a risk factor for fifty years. It took about forty years until governments started to introduce things like smoking bans in public places. It all takes time.”
Even in Britain, where a mere 1 or 2 percent of all trips are made on a bicycle, the average person would ride two million miles before they faced even a serious injury.9 So why scare people?
Study after study has shown that the number one reason most people don’t cycle is because of a fear of motor traffic.
they could not imagine riding a bike in such overwhelmingly car-oriented urban layouts.
“The minority of people who cycle in English cities tend to do so despite, not because of, existing conditions,”
while actual injuries might remain fairly rare, fear and alarm are near-daily companions for far too many riders.
killing or maiming someone on the roads is still seen as tragic but inescapable.
This in turn fuels a complacent, entitled, careless driving culture, where millions of people who would see themselves as moral, kind, and careful people nonetheless get into a motor vehicle and routinely, unthinkingly, put others’ lives in peril.
Between 2001 and 2013, 3,380 American citizens died due to terrorism at home or abroad, the great majority in the September 11 attacks.13 Over that same period a shade over 501,000 people died on US roads, or the cumulative terrorism total roughly every month.14 One much-quoted study suggested that the decision of many US travelers to switch from air travel to driving in the wake of September 11 brought about around 1,500 additional road deaths.15
“Accidents in the main arise from the taking of very small risks a very large number of times,” he said. “A thousand-to-one chance against an accident may not be rated very high, but for every thousand people that take it there will be an accident.”
I’m generally happier not owning a car, in part because of the inevitable, unrelenting expense, but also because every time I sit behind the wheel I’m agonizingly aware that this is the one time in my everyday existence where there’s a real, if statistically slight, chance that I could take a life.
People don’t change their personality when they get off a bike and into a car. It’s simply that the risks you take in a vehicle can have appallingly magnified consequences. It’s not morals, it’s just physics.
The US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration makes the chilling calculation that at any one moment of daylight across America about 660,000 drivers are looking at a phone or another electronic device.
That speeding is dangerous is both much debated and, when you look at the evidence, utterly irrefutable.
This was a one-way massacre, and yet even RoSPA, an organization officially dedicated to road safety, seemed to believe it was up to the victims to adapt for the convenience of their killers.
While in 1969 almost 90 percent of US children who lived within a mile of school would walk or cycle, by 1999 this had dropped to 30 percent. The researchers found a much-celebrated 70 percent decrease in child pedestrian fatalities was matched by a 67 percent decrease in walking to school.30
to see road deaths as something that can be analyzed, predicted, and thus eventually eliminated. “When you map out where the severe and fatal crashes are, you often see trends,” says Leah Shahum.
For instance, in San Francisco, seventy percent of the severe crashes happen on twelve percent of the streets.”
As an example, consider me riding my solid, everyday bike at 12 mph. If some hypothetical inattention meant I hit a pedestrian, they would face kinetic energy of about 1,250 joules. That’s not insignificant, but it could be much worse. Had I been driving the last car I owned, a relatively tiny Nissan MICRA, the energy imparted of that traveling at 30 mph would have equated to just short of 100,000 joules. Make it a midsized SUV at 35 mph, and suddenly we’re at almost 270,000 joules.
A US road safety group found the death rate for pedestrians is 2.3 percent for cars traveling between 10 mph and 20 mph. At 40 mph or more, 54 percent of people are killed.41
If there are safe, coherent bike lanes, children are far less reliant on a parent being a chauffeur. Older people who struggle to walk a long distance or are wary of driving can possibly still use a bike, especially a modern, electrically assisted machine. Women are far more likely to cycle. Many people with disabilities can use handcycles or other adapted machines that they might not wish to ride amid heavy traffic.
The deeply unjust truth is that in thousands of cities, from London to New York to Shanghai to Delhi, transport is mainly built around cars, and thus explicitly for the benefit of the richer-than-average minority who disproportionately own them.
Enrique Peñalosa, the mayor of Colombia’s sprawling, chaotic capital city of Bogotá, built hundreds of miles of protected bike lanes, arguing that they are vital to equality. “They are a right, just as sidewalks are,” he said. “They are a powerful symbol of democracy. They show that a citizen on a thirty-dollar bicycle is equally important to one in a thirty-thousand-dollar car.”
The British biologist Professor Steve Jones once described the bicycle as the greatest-ever invention to combat genetic disorders, since it gave people who previously tended to only marry those within walking distance of their homes a new opportunity to woo and mate with a far greater variety of potential partners.14
And while the statistics for older cycling in Denmark are fantastic, in the Netherlands they become truly astonishing. Levels of cycling only began to drop after the age of seventy, and even at the age of eighty about 20 percent of all trips are made on a bike.
