Why is Cycling Good for the Environment?

Using a human to power a machine is obviously a lot greener and perhaps more efficient than lugging around a tone of steel with an oil burning engine.

Mike Berners-Lee suggests that cycling is only better for the environment if you watch what you eat. The carbon footprint of 1miles' cycling will vary accordingly depending on what you have for dinner.

	65g CO2e: powered by bananas
	260g CO2e: powered by cheeseburgers

The governments target for new cars is 206 grams per mile so you had better watch what you eat if you want to be an environmental cyclist right. . .well that's not the whole story, and don't forget the CO2 figures for cars don't take in to account the calories the driver is burning as he sits behind the wheel, and the embodied carbon of building a car.

Embodied Environmental Impact of Cycling

Building a car is way more energy intensive than building a bicycle, more parts, more mass, more materials. There is also disposal to think of.

The infrastructure for cycling is a lot lighter than that for a car, plus a road with cycles on its can carry more people per unit of time than the same road with cars and even with buses on it.

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