Every half year or so, editorial writers in the print press cycle out a rant on cycling. This time it’s the Province fulminating away:
First line:
No one can deny that cycling is good exercise, kind to the environment and inexpensive transportation.
Okay, stop right there. Because we can easily guess how the rest of this rant will go: money spent on cycling isn’t justified by the few fantatics who do it. And City Hall is nuts to be spending hard-earned taxpayers dollars to do so.
But how much is good exercise, environmental kindness and transportation choice actually worth? Literally. I’d like to know what number follows the $ – because the editorial assumes the only appropriate measure is value for dollar.
So what is the nominal value of good exercise? A rising tide of disease caused by obesity threatens our medical care system. Type 2 diabetes alone is going to be a huge economic burden. Cycling addresses this problem directly. How much should be credited to it?
Environmental kindness. Cycling is +; cars are -. Assign a value to the carbon not emitted by a bike. Include it in the + column.
Yes, cycling is inexpensive. If that means a cyclist has more money to spend on local goods and services, as opposed to automobiles and oil, little of which are produced in B.C., then again, that’s real value to be included in the calculations.
More than that, cycling opens up road space for other users. It’s one of the practical choices needed for a transportation system to work – unlike a car-dominant one, for which there are few examples of success. (Let’s have the Province identify a place that has effectively addressed congestion by building more roads and bridges.)
In fact, because Vancouver did not build more road space, sescpially freeways (requiring big bucks to maintain) over the last few decades and instead encouraged transit, walking and cycling, there are fewer vehicles competing for space in this city. Leaving aside the theoretical value of that space (or the money saved by not having to build more), isn’t in the interest of car users to see more space available to them, even if some it is reallocated to encourage cycling by those who fear being in mixed traffic? Isn’t that a win-win?
Isn’t that worth maybe $25 million?
Interestingly, accounting for the health benefits of cycling is not unusual in some European countries:
“In a few countries calculations have been done assessing the cost of inactivity including medical treatment costs and to a varying degree production losses and loss of welfare. For Norway the result – used in the analysis mentioned above – is 980 Euro per person per year. A Swiss investigation comes to the result 564 Euro per person per year. In Finland the figure 1,200 Euro per year for a physically active person (compared to an inactive) has even been included in a manual for costbenefit analysis of road infrastructure projects.”
Kjartan Saelensminde: Walking- and cycling track networks in Norwegian cities. Cost-benefit analyses including health effects and external costs of road traffic. Norwegian Institute of Transport Economics, report 567/2002 (with summary in English, available at http://www.toi.no)
I sent in an e-mail asking to hear back on the source of the 3.7 per cent of trips to work made by bike, as it struck me that that is the same number that was found in the 2006 census (which of course was higher than the 3.3 per cent found in the 1996 census, it’s good to remember). I still haven’t heard a response yet, but maybe they’re just busy. Either way, does anyone know of any more updated numbers than the census data? Is that number still accurate? Somehow my own anecdotal experience doesn’t trust it.
And if the four-year-old census data is what they are using, this editorial is even more fishy.
The Province does this because they know it will generate a lot of interest and hits on their web site.
They are also a bit confused. Based on the 3.7% commuting mode share “They claim “Given that more than 96 per cent of residents — voters, we might remind council — haven’t embraced cycling…”. This is really not correct. Around 25% of people cycle at least once a week and over 50% cycle at least once a year. All these people will likely cycle more as the city improves its cycling facilities. The $25 million is not focused on the 4% who do cycle all the time, it is focused on the people who want to cycle more but don’t because the current bicycle routes are too scary.