The 2 Mile Challenge
from Clif Bar
Launched in September, the campaign is asking Americans to ride your bike to fight global warming. Although we have the highest per capita bike ownership, we're at the bottom of the list for using them. Clif Bar founder Gary Erickson explains,Forty percent of urban trips in the United States are two miles or less, but people use their cars nearly ninety percent of the time for those short jaunts. If we rode bikes for those two-mile trips, we’d get in shape, unclog our roads and spare the planet from millions of tons of car-belching carbon emissions.
The 2-Mile Challenge website has a Google interactive map that lets you enter your zip code, to see what kind of destinations are within 2 miles of your home. These destinations include bike shops, grocery stores, bars and restaurants, parks, banks, and public transportation. So if one million people replaced a two-mile car trip, once a week, with a bike ride, CO2 emissions would be reduced by 50,000 tons per year.
Labels: cagers, enviromatters, serious shit
posted by Da' Square Wheelman, at 9:55 AM
2 Comments:
Great idea - I'm on a mission next year to see if I can in fact ditch my car, and have set myself a fifteen mile challenge. It sounds a lot further than two miles, but once you get used to being on the saddle, the extra distance is actually quite trivial - getting out of your car in the first place is much tougher (thousand mile journeys starting with a single stem & all that jazz).
Good luck, Karl! It took me a few false starts to get up to my daily commute. The toughest thing the first year was getting on the road in winter. Each year I'd get farther & farther into the season until I made it all the way through to spring %)
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