Do you wish that you could manage to waste even more in life? You’re lucky! All you need to do is drive everywhere you go. On the other hand, do you want to save money, be more healthy, live longer, be happier, waste less, and protect the planet? Good news: biking is for you.

Readers of this blog know by now that I love biking, but one of my other passions is living as waste-free as possible. I managed to go a whole year without sending anything to the landfill; instead, I stored my trash in the basement. In the end, all of it fit into two Rubbermaid bins. So it’s great when these two things go together and complement one another so well.

I see a lot of well-meaning people who are trying to live waste-free, yet there sometimes is a glaring discrepancy in their daily routines. Driving is an incredibly inefficient form of transportation and yet it’s become embedded deeply in modern society. It’s a reckless habit that most people don’t even notice.

What makes it so wasteful? A car is a tool: a two-tonne finely honed machine that is capable of generating vast amounts of power. As a tool, is very useful for certain things, like moving big cargoes or large numbers of people over long distances. You’re renovating your house and need to go pick up a new toilet, sink, kitchen cabinet and tiles? A car is perfect for that. You and the rest of your family want to go skiing for the day? Sure, drive away.

A car is not the best tool to move your ass a couple of kilometers to the grocery store.
It’s raining? A car is a very inefficient substitute for an umbrella or a raincoat. “But, IT’S COLD” you might say. Try winter clothes. I mean, do you really need to extract oil from the ground, ship it halfway around the world, incur all of the environmental damage that entails, and then burn it up just to keep you warm?

For most people, a car becomes more than a tool: it becomes a habit. Actually, it’s an addiction. They get so used to driving everywhere that they start to depend on their cars, and if you take them away, they go through withdrawal. They never spent the time to invest in a bike, take the bus, or get to know the way around the neighborhood. In turn, cities have grown around the concept of driving everywhere. We’ve built our communities to prioritize cars over other forms of transportation, making our cities less efficient overall.

Driving wastes gas.

This is the most obvious inefficiency. Gasoline, kerosene, diesel etc are amazing sources of energy: compact, transportable, and touched by a flame can unleash a massive amount of propulsion. This energy is the result of a chemical process that takes millions of years, and incredible amounts of pressure and heat. That’s why it takes so long to make oil. A lot gets put into it. Once oil is used up, it will take another million years to make more.

So what? With fracking, ever deeper wells, and other technology, are we really in danger of running out of gas? At first, we were slurping up the surface oil that was most easy to find and made more recently. Now as we dig deeper and deeper what we are really going is going back farther and farther in time. We’re pulling up oil that was made longer and longer ago. This can’t go on forever. By using it up, we’re denying it to future generations, should they need it for something actually important and not idling in the drive-thru.

Biking is fueled by a wide variety of renewable fuels such as cheesecake and grilled cheese sandwiches. Luckily, these fuel sources are not only sustainable, but they are delicious, and a fuel spill is easily wiped up with a cloth.

Driving wastes the planet.

In many US cities, more space is given over to cars than to any other use. Roads and parking lots take up space that could be used for parks, growing food, or housing. All that pavement causes issues with water runoff, which in turn costs more money to build storm drains and sewers. It makes it farther to get from one place to another, which in turn makes it longer to walk or bike or use any other form of transportation. Considering that most cars sit unused for the vast majority of their life, and even when they are being driven, they mostly only have one person inside of them, that’s a lot of our real estate that is being used very inefficiently. That’s also a lot of space to clear snow from in winter.

Urban society has made a collective compromise to give up nice patios and quiet, walkable streets in exchange for being able to drive everywhere.

In winter, an obnoxious amount of salt is put down to keep our roads and parking lots clear. This salt is toxic to the environment, and while it only costs $50/tonne, it causes thousands of dollars per tonne of damage. It ruins everything from our roads and bridges to our carpets and boots. I don’t have anything against clear roads, but if there were less people driving, we would need a whole lot less salt.

The environmental costs of shipping oil all around the world is one thing; chopping up nature to put down highways is another. Running a highway through natural habitat wreaks havoc on the large animals that live there.

Urban sprawl, caused by cars, leads to mile upon mile of low-density living, which in turn needs more gas (to travel in), more expensive infrastructure (to run water, sewer, electricity, etc over greater distances).

I haven’t even touched CO₂ emissions yet because it’s just such an obvious problem by this time, but global warming is the number one problem we face today and a fifth of that is directly caused by driving.

Biking requires far less space, allowing space to be used far more efficiently. There are no noxious emissions. Bike paths can be built with little impact on the surrounding nature.

Driving wastes money.

Most people don’t have an idea of how much driving actually costs them. Let’s take a look at what it costs to go get groceries, assuming that it’s a 10km round trip to the grocery store.

Gas is the most obvious cost, and currently in Canada it is around $1 / L. Shockingly, the top two best-selling vehicles in Canada are the Ford F-150 and the Dodge Ram, and four of the top five top-selling vehicles in Canada are pickup trucks (the only non-truck is the Honda Civic), according to driving.ca. The F150 goes 12L/100km, so just in gas you’re paying $1.20 for that trip. “But you’re just taking an arbitrary gas-guzzler to make your point!” I hear you say. The base F150 is actually not that far off of the average for Canada as a whole in terms of mileage, which is 10.6L/100km. But wait; the price of gas is only a small factor.

There’s the price of the vehicle itself. Let’s say you drive your vehicle 200,000km in its lifetime, at a purchase price of around $36000 (including tax) for the cheapest model, that adds another 18¢ per km, or $1.80. Note that there are a lot of crazy people out there that spend even more than that on their cars.

Tires? A set of tires will set you back about $800 for 100,000 km. Oil changes are $40 for 8000km. So about another 15 cents for that grocery trip.
Wiper blades, light bulbs, floor mats etc add a penny or two.

Repairs? Parts break down over time. Factor in another $1500 per year on average. The average driver drives 15,200 km/year (this was totally shocking to me. Who can possibly drive that much?), so another $1 for your grocery trip.

Insurance? In Ontario, the average policy costs $1,920 / year, so add another $1.30 for that trip.

Where does that leave us? Here’s the total:

Gas	$1.20
Vehicle	$1.80
Consumables	$0.16
Repairs	$1
Insurance	$1.30
Total	$5.46

Shocking? That’s just for one trip. That works out to 55¢ / km. Plug that into the average annual travel, and you get $8,360 per year! That is insane. I couldn’t believe it, so I did a quick search and the first thing that came up showed this price is actually at the low end for Canadians.

Those are just the direct costs. Two-car family? DOUBLE that. If you were to take that money and invest it in an index fund, getting an average 4% return per year, after 10 years you’d have an extra $226,000.

“Holy Shit! Cars cost a lot more than I ever thought” you might be saying to yourself. But there’s still more to it. Paving costs between $3 to $5 per square foot. Yes, it’s as expensive as laying down fancy marble tiles. You’re looking at about $3,000,000 for a single kilometer of road. For a parking lot, look at about $47,000 per spot once you include the price of the land. Once you pave it, you’re stuck maintaining it too. Repairing potholes, painting the lines, and so on. In Ottawa, the city spent close to $70 million last year on snow clearing, and more than $44 million on repairing roads, which was widely acknowledged to not be enough.

What about the costs of the legal framework to make driving even possible? Police, courthouses, laws, government bailouts of failing car companies? It costs money for our courts to hear DUI cases, argue over parking tickets, let alone deal with collisions.

Car collisions are one of the largest causes of death and injury. For Canadians under 44 years of age, car collisions are the primary cause of accidental death, and the cost of a collision can include not just fixing the car, but health-related costs (from broken bones, physiotherapy, etc), and also time off work.

From these numbers alone, we can see that a simple trip to the grocery store wastes a lot of money. For a 15 minute trip, you’re looking to spend at least $8, when you factor in all of the costs. Look at it this way. If our cars were coin-operated, would you still take your car to the store if you had to plug in a quarter every 30 seconds?

Biking hardly costs anything at all. You can set up up your whole family quite luxuriously for $6000 which includes a cargo bike, a commuter bike, bikes for the kids, panniers, and lights. You can use the winter jacket that you already have. Let’s be crazy and add another $600 / year at the bike shop to keep your bikes in good order. They last 10 years, and you ride a total of 10,000 km/year. That works out to 12 cents / km. That trip to the grocery store? It cost $1.20.

Don’t forget: these are top of the line, luxury bikes. You could easily get by for half that price. But wait: there’s more! Because none of you need a gym membership anymore now that you’ll all be in great shape, your annual maintenance is more than paid for.

Driving wastes time.

The dream of driving is that you can get wherever you want quickly and efficiently. Cars equal Freedom. The reality falls short.

How many times have you been stuck in a parking lot, driving around looking for a place to park? What about waiting behind someone else who just can’t seem to do a three point turn and needs a lot of time to get it right? Then there’s the time stuck in traffic. Guess what: you’re not stuck in traffic. You’re stuck being traffic.

It’s a self-perpetuating loop that cars make travelling long distances easy, so then things are built far away from one another, which requires driving, which then clogs up the roads and makes driving slow.

Even the time to walk out from a store or work to your car, start it, wait to get out of the lot, and on the way can be an issue. I used to amaze my co-workers when we worked at an American business park that I could walk from the office to the nearby lunch places, order my food, and be eating by the time they got there, they wasted so much time getting in and out. They accused me of running, when in fact I had a leisurely stroll.

Speaking of wasted time, the time stuck in your car is lost to you forever. While I was out enjoying my stroll, they were not accomplishing anything of value. How many people drive to the gym in order to get exercise? How many kids that could be walking to school get driven, and then don’t get enough exercise in their lives? If you factored in the cost of your time, driving wastes even more money.

Then, there’s the time spent getting oil changes, changing the tires, filling up at the gas station, scraping the ice off the windshield, renewing your license, and so on.

“This makes no sense! Biking is even slower than driving, so don’t even try to argue that biking saves time” you say. Of course. Bikes go a lot slower than cars. But: are they really?

Time spent biking is not lost. It keeps you in shape, physically and emotionally. It’s giving your body something it naturally needs. You don’t need to spend time at the gym any more. You need less downtime to relax. You can pick up stuff more easily on the way home. Not only that, because cyclists are healthier, they actually live longer lives. On average, every hour you spend cycling, you more than make back in longer life. You also are sick less, so need less time off work.

Next time you go to the grocery store, do this experiment. Get out your stopwatch and time how long it takes to get from the door of your house to the door of the grocery store when driving, and then do the same again by bike. If nothing else, you’ll understand truly how much time you’re spending.

What about work commutes? Some people drive half an hour or more to get to work each way. Wouldn’t it take longer to bike there? Quite likely it would. You could also take the bus, and use the time wasted driving to read or be productive in other ways. You could start your work day right in the bus. If more people took the bus, that would take cars off the road, leading to better and faster bus service.

You could also choose a job that is closer to home, or a home that is closer to your work. Having a car enables you to take jobs that are far away, and the cost of long, soul-deadening commutes are often not factored into the equation. In fact, adding 20 minutes to your commute makes you as miserable as getting a 19 percent pay cut.

Finally, going back to the start, the car is a tool. If it really makes sense to you to drive those long commutes, go ahead! It’s not a waste after all. Maybe try biking on nice days. At least go into the decision with a clear understanding of what it’s costing you.

Driving wastes opportunities.

Consider this scenario: You leave for work, stopping on the way at the daycare to drop off your kid. Everyone else is doing the same thing so you’re stuck waiting behind everyone else, their cars idling away. Finally it’s your turn. Dropoff done, you get on the way, but there’s a big queue at the red light and everyone is in your way. Finally you’re at the office. At the end of the day, you do the reverse. At least, you try to, but there’s someone delivering a pizza on your street, and they aren’t sure where the house is exactly, so they are driving slowly and erratically and are IN YOUR WAY. Finally you get home, push the button for the garage door opener, and head straight in to your house through the garage.

Consider the alternative: Your kid hops on the back of your utility bike or into the bike trailer. On the way, you come across other parents doing the same. You ride next to them and have a chat along the way. Their oldest is riding their own bike to school and getting some fresh air and working out their extra abundance of energy,. Your kids talk about the game last night. Your find out that your friend just got a promotion, so you invite them over for dinner later to celebrate.

You head on to work, thinking about how to handle that knotty HR issue and realize that you’ve been going about it the wrong way. You can do this because you’re not stressed out.

After work, on the way home you spot a sale on at a store and decide to stop and pop in. It just takes a minute, less time than it would have taken to drive around the block hunting for parking. But then, you don’t have the capacity to be looking at shop windows when you’re driving anyways. Finally, you get home, and your neighbor down the street is outside planting flowers. You stop for a minute to enjoy them and decide that tomorrow, you should plant some flowers too.

Driving wastes lives.

Biking reduces your risk of dying from heart disease, stroke, pulmonary problems, obesity, joint problems, arthritis, cancer, and depression. Driving leads to physical inactivity, which increases all of the above, and leads to more stress and all of its problems.

Being more fit makes you more active in general. If you are in shape, then you’re more likely to take the stairs up a floor than wait for the elevator. You enjoy hiking more. You go out for a swim.

Biking and Zero Waste Shopping

Zero-waste shoppers live a life beyond packaging. You bring your own containers to the store, get them filled with what you need, and bring them back home. This naturally leads to buying exactly the quantities that you need, when you need them.

Good news! This fits perfectly with biking to the store. You buy smaller amounts. You don’t buy junk you don’t need. You start to deal directly with farmers and other local producers, who can either deliver directly to you, or deliver to farmers’ markets in the neighbourhood.

With a bike trailer or cargo bike, you can fit way more.

In my case, I could roll right up to the farm stand, pick up my veggies, put them directly into my panniers, and roll back out again. I could get my meat delivery with my trailer.

Zero-waste living is catching on and gaining a lot of momentum here in Ottawa, as more and more people realize that we can’t keep sending garbage to the landfills forever and ignore the long-term costs of dealing with it sustainably. Trying to live a zero-waste life conflicts with driving everywhere, but biking goes hand-in-hand.

Learn more about shopping by bike.