Practical Benefits
More Parking
Cycling on a daily basis does not only have personal financial and health benefits, but is can also be convenient, efficient, and socially beneficial. Riding a bike for errands can save the rider time and money due to the ease of free parking, on a curb or designated area. Bikers can save money by not paying for parking at work or where they shop, and, since bike racks are prevalent at most retail locations, can save time that would otherwise be spend looking for a place to park their car.
Bikes are 28 times more space efficient than cars. This means that 2,800 bikes will fit on the same land as 100 cars. In the District of Columbia, where it can cost $10,000 for a surface parking space, $20,000 for a structured parking space, or more than $40,000 to build each below-ground parking space. Cars parked in parking lots take up valuable real estate.
In addition, parking lot sealants contain a host of chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a group of approximately 10,000 compounds, which are, for the most part, created by the incomplete burning of carbon-containing materials like oil, wood, garbage or coal. Studies have shown that PAHs can cause cancer in humans and kill aquatic life. Although PAH levels in the parking lot sealants are too low to make people sick, they are significant enough to impact aquatic ecosystems: parking lot sealants may contribute about 90 percent - perhaps even 95 percent - of the PAH pollution in urban watersheds.
Bicycling may be faster:
For some people, there will be even yet another advantage to bicycling to work: it will be faster.
Americans spend more than 100 hours commuting to work each year, according to American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. This exceeds the two weeks of vacation time (80 hours) frequently taken by workers over the course of a year. For the nation as a whole, the average daily commute to work lasted about 24.3 minutes in 2003. Washington DC and its suburbs rank high in extreme commute times.
Based on a ranking of states with the longest average commute-to-work times, the ACS showed that New York (30.4 minutes) and Maryland (30.2 minutes) residents spent the most time traveling to their jobs. Workers living in Prince William County, Va. (36.4 minutes); and Prince George's County, Md. (35.5 minutes) suburban counties located within the Washington, D.C. metro area faced some of the longest commutes. Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, DC are ranked #3, #6, and #9 in percent of workers who travel 90 minutes or more for work.
However, at the same time, the Washington, D.C. area is one of the best multi-modal commuting cities in the nation. It is 2nd in public transportation usage with 33.2% of the population. It ranks 1st in walk to work with over 11.8% of the population walking to work. It ranks fourth in bike to work rating in the country (Portland is 3.5%, Minneapolis is 2.4%, Seattle at 2.3%, and DC at 1.9%). This combined with 11.0% carpooling (thanks to HOV lanes) makes DC one of the few metro areas where the majority of the population does not drive alone to work.
In Washington, DC, with its urban and suburban bike trails and notorious traffic problems, is an ideal place to bike to work. Most cyclists can cover a five mile distance in 15 to 30 minutes (10 - 20 miles per hour), while the average downtown speed for motor vehicles is about 13 miles per hour. Clearly, biking may be a faster transportation alternative to many downtown commuters. And, considering that 28% of the 671,678 people employed in Washington, D.C., commute within the city, and 35.4% of households in Washington, D.C. do not own a car, biking would be a faster, cheaper, and more efficient alternative for many Washington, DC residents.
Save Money
Drivers pay close to $20 per day (insurance, gas, liens, tolls, etc.) to driver their cars, and that does not include parking fees. After arriving to work, cyclists can often park their bikes closer to the job, and usually park for free, saving the average Washington, DC commuter up to $12 per day in parking fees. In contrast, it will cost a cyclist less than $1, on average, to ride to work.