5 Reasons Why Biking Is Better than Walking

Adapted from an essay originally written for Professor Barnett’s Theory and Principles of Urban Design class at the University of Pennsylvania on November 13, 2003.

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Transportation clearly influences the design of urban spaces. One need only compare the auto-dominated sprawl of the suburbs with growing success of pedestrian and transit-oriented cities like Portland and Seattle to see the tremendous differences planners can make in the design of their region by simply turning away from highway projects and focusing instead on connecting small walkable communities with efficient public transit. The return to creating “traditional” towns based on the pedestrian and public transit is heralded as improving public health, saving money, developing “social capital”, enhancing environmental sustainability, decreasing crime, and providing solutions to social equity concerns. While all of these claims could be true, planners seem to have forgotten that the bicycle can accomplish all of these goals more easily and cost effectively than a pedestrian and transit-oriented system.  In fact, riding a bicycle is healthier, cheaper, cleaner, more equitable, and faster than the usual neo-traditional prescription of taking public transit and walking, and it’s just as sociable and safe.

1. Exercise: Not only is biking better for public health than walking, it is also generally acclaimed as one of the best forms of exercise. Much is made of recent claims that “walkable cities” might be part of the answer to America’s obesity problem, but a city in which biking is the preferred mode of transportation, where all trips between one and five miles were made on a bicycle, could claim to not only make significant in-roads into the obesity problem but summarily blow it out of the water. Biking exercises more muscles than walking (in fact, more muscles than most any other form of exercise other than swimming and mountain climbing) and is a lower impact form of physical movement. Additionally, biking is more likely than walking to invoke the internal release of endorphins, leading to more energy and a better sense of well being. Enabling people to stroll to the train station or the corner store certainly creates a healthier atmosphere than the current system of walking all the way to one’s driveway, but cities in which most inhabitants bike five miles to and from work every day would be nothing less than a revolution in American public health.
2. Affordability: Despite the initial upfront cost of purchasing a bicycle, biking as a mode of transportation is actually cheaper than walking. Advocates for the pedestrian argue simplistically that “it doesn’t cost anything to walk,” but they forget the large number of options walkers forego because of limitations in the distance they can traverse in a timely fashion. Even in a New Urbanist “walkable city”, pedestrians will have to either walk for quite some time or spend some money on public transit if they ever want to go outside the vicinity of their neighborhood. Using Philadelphia’s admittedly exorbitant rates for public transit, a simple trip to the other side of the city and back would cost four dollars. If this trip needed to happen daily, one would only have to look three months down the road to see that he could have spent the money on a bicycle and saved $4 a day from there on out. When added up over the life of the bike, the savings could amount to thousands of dollars. Pedestrians in a “pedestrian-oriented” city must accept these costs or spend a lot of time walking everywhere.
3. Environmental Sustainability: Advocates of walking also proclaim that pedestrian-oriented communities are built at a “scale of sustainability”. This catch-phrase is vague enough to be dismissed without much thought, but the real argument for a bicycle-oriented community in this regard is that bicycles cut down on the need not only for automobile traffic but also for public transit. Generally, consuming fossil fuels and depleting our atmosphere are “unsustainable” activities, and the automobile is certainly the top culprit in both of these questionable enterprises. However, public transit, while correctly hailed as a major improvement over automobiles, still consumes fuel and pollutes, and a pedestrian-oriented city must rely on it for trips of more than a mile. Tomlinson, who essentially wrote the paper I would want to write were this assignment a capstone project for my degree, goes to some lengths discussing biking as a superior mode of sustainable transit.
4. Equity: A bicycle-oriented system is more equitable than a pedestrian or transit-oriented system. Again, public transit has a well-known history as a tool to improve social equity; the experiment in Cleveland was successful enough to write a book about it. However, bike transit offers significant cost savings if used to cut back on some public transit needs. Obviously, the cost of infrastructure for bikes is significantly less than that for either automobiles, buses, or trains: bikes take up only a twelfth of the space a medium-sized car does, allowing for less lanes and smaller parking areas. Additionally, bicycles are clearly cheaper to make than any form of motor vehicle. Although suggesting that bikes be used entirely instead of public transit or automobiles is rather silly, creating a bicycle-oriented transit system in which public transit augments rather than dominates the transit experience would allow municipalities to cut back on costs in maintaining and developing infrastructure for both automobiles and public transit. These cost savings can in turn be spent on job training, education, and other programs beneficial to social equity.
5. Faster: Everyone knows that biking is faster than walking, but, according the the Delaware Valley Regional Planning Commission, the average cyclist can travel at a speed (12.5 mph) faster than the average driver does during peak hours in Philadelphia (<12 mph).

Pedestrian-oriented communities claim to decrease crime. This claim is as old as Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities and lives on today in New Urbanist propaganda. While concepts like Jacobs’ “eyes on the street” go a long way in convincing us of their claims, all are applicable to a bicycle-oriented transit system. Riding a bicycle instead of using a car or public transit will not inhibit our ability to place residences over shops or to populate inviting parks and squares with artisans, shoppers, and casual strollers. Moreover, a strong argument can be made for the fact that diversity of uses, physical design, and population has more to do with decreasing crime than simply the presence of pedestrians [Fowler]. Again, a purely bicycle-oriented city will not infringe upon this diversity.

The next post suggests seven ways to create a more bicycle-oriented city.