Welcome to weekly post number 18. For this post we are going to be talking about the environment an I’ll explain why later in the post. Also some extra news is that their will be another podcast episode coming out very soon. Even though that has nothing to do with this post I thought it would be good to let people know. So lets go straight into weekly post number 18.
Why am I talking about the environment? Well over the week I looked at this service that offers to valet your bikes when you don’t need them and want them to be safe. This seemed like a really interesting idea, and on their website ( link HERE ) it talks about how this service encourages people to travel by bike rather than car because now they have an extra safe place to store them. All of this lead me to the question “ how do bikes impact the environment compared to cars?”. Now I am sure this question has been asked millions of times, but personally I don’t know the answer, so I went and did a little research to see what I could find.
Believe me I found a lot. The best answers I found were on the Reid Bikes website which explained the major factors clearly. According to them just being able to create the carbon frame for a bike is way better than a car, in fact it is 10x better than a car. Another huge upside to biking is of course the zero-emissions. Bikes are considered to be zero-emission because they don’t use any type of fuel, on the other hand cars need to burn through gasoline in order to make anything happen. This is what I think is the main factors when deciding what is bette for our environment, as we know fuel does nothing good to help our environment.
Now I just listed a bunch of negatives about cars, however as we have seen in the recent years the amount of e-cars are starting to improve. At the moment e-cars are still rather expensive and do take quite a bit of maintenance, but if we see a growth in the quality and quantity of these cars, then maybe we can have a future were we are still able to drive freely and not harm the environment.
On the other hand I read another article by IMBA that talks about the environmental damage done by mountain biking. They actually go on to say how mountain biking itself is not a problem but rather how well the trail is built and where it is built. They say that a poor trail location and build can lead to vegetation loss due to erosion and disruption of wildlife.
Personally as a person who likes to mountain bike every now and then I don’t see these problems at all. This may be because I only ride the designated trails, but I still see an abundance of vegetation and I have also seen a good amount of wildlife around the trails.
Overall I think it is interesting as in class we talked about how things developed over the last 70 years and we see in these articles how right now we are in a bit of a problematic area but if we keep on working toward a environmentally friendly future than we can solve all of these problems. I wonder if this is how people 70 years ago thought about the future? Maybe to specifically about the environment but other issues that were big at the time.
That’s all for now