For any given volume of people-moving, bike paths cover less land than streets and highways, thus minimizing environmental impacts like water runoff, oil spills, and reduction of arable land. It turns out that the bike is also good for us. A third auto-motive for bicycling is the bottom line, the place where the rubber meets the road. Careful economic analysis reveals that the real cost of driving a mile in a car is far more than a dollar, if you factor in expenses like purchase price and maintenance costs, insurance and registration, and social costs like road construction and repair, parking and policing, productivity lost to congestion, the cost of protecting oil supplies, and environmental damage. It costs 95 percent less to support a passenger-mile of bike traffic than the same mile of car traffic, in part because cars take up so much space, both on the road and off it.
Bikes are, in fact, the world's most popular transportation tool.
In some countries, as many as twenty percent of trips are made by bike. Even in the United States, more than half of all car trips are three miles or less. And more than a quarter of our errands are under a mile. So we could bike if we chose to. Of course, the main problem with riding a bike in America is that we live in a car culture that places places far apart.