Michael Graham Richard, 9 March 2010, Canada: TreeHugger - Cars & Transportation (bikes) Via CarFree.us

"I knew I was benefiting myself and the environment by commuting without a car, but to see the real impact is very amazing."

Photo by CarFree.us

If you want to get around faster than your feet can take you while doing as little harm as possible, the bicycle is your best option. An unnamed author has recently started documenting his experience with becoming a bicycle commuter, and the results are interesting (and hopefully encouraging enough that others will do the same!). In a recent post, he does a little math to see how much money his new green commuting habits are saving him (without forgetting all the non-monetary benefits).

His whole post is worth reading (especially if you've never seen the math done on commuting by bike vs by car), but here are some highlights:

In two months I have had the following impact:

• I’ve saved $47 in gasoline expenses and the equivalent of $457 in fixed costs for a total savings of $471.49 when accounting for bus costs.
• Burned 22,356 calories which if I had been eating a normal diet is the equivalent of 6.4 pounds of fat!
• I have kept 543 pounds of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere (19.546 lbs per gallon and my car gets an average of 21 MPG).
• Simply multiplying these numbers for the year would equal 3260 pounds of CO2 kept out of the atmosphere, $2542 dollars saved, 134,000 calories burned, and 38.3 pounds of fat. If I had a car loan payment for a $20,000 [car] the savings jumps to $7900!

Read more . . .