As I wrote earlier, beginning about eight months ago I’ve been riding a bicycle to and from work three or four days per week, something I wish I had done 20 years ago. It was something I had long been interested in, but which had seemed impractical without a host of unavailable services — indoor bicycle parking, showers, a place at work to store business attire, etc. But after a little research and given “business casual” clothes that can be carried in a bag, I have found that it is doable after all, even though my commute is nine miles in each direction. I haven’t been riding to save the earth or save money — the subway, my other transportation mode, does a very good job of both, particularly with TransitChek. What bicycling to work has done has allowed me to improve my health by getting lots of exercise without using very much of my most scarce resource — time. I’m a little late to the party, but riding to work given me a new perspective on certain health, personal finance, transportation, and city planning issues. This post on the bicycle and personal lifestyle and the one following on the bicycle and public policy are based on this new perspective, and the upcoming institutional collapse I wrote about previously.
It is now widely understood that obesity may be the most pressing health problem in the United States. Most of the attention has focused on excess calories and poor food choices — fast food, processed food, convenience food, snacks food, sugary sodas. For many people, perhaps most people, that may be the biggest part of the problem. I eat practically none of that stuff, however, and yet I’ve battled my weight just like everything else. And in the course of that battle, I’ve figured out just how little someone who sits at a desk all day actually needs to eat to keep their weight steady, even someone six feet tall and 225 pounds. Just 2,400 calories per day will do it, less when offset by the occasional restaurant meal or holiday dinner. That’s with a subway ride to work that requires two miles per day of walking and, when taking the BMT over the bridge to break up the boredom, climbing up 220 stairs. For someone who enjoys good food, that isn’t much.
This may amount to anecdotal epidemiology, if there can be such a thing, but I remember my grandparents’ generation eating far more, especially on Sundays when a large multi-course dinner was almost always served. A lot more. That generation, however, also got far more exercise in the normal course of living. Most worked in manual occupations, housework also involved more physical effort, and most of the women — my grandmothers and great aunts — never learned to drive. They walked, many worked on the Fischer Body assembly line up in Tarrytown, and they hung their clothes on the line outside to dry. Aside from a grandfather who died of a heart attack at 60 that probably wouldn’t have killed him if he were alive today (my wife had a grandfather who died similarly), members of that generation lived and were physically active until well past 80, at least in my family. They may end up being the healthiest generation in U.S. history — with bodies strengthened by physical work yet cushioned by modern medicine.
The shift to a lifestyle with less normal-course-of -events exercise in the 1950s and 1960s coincided with a rise in dieting and in exercise for the sake of exercise — health clubs, treadmills, aerobic dancing, the running boom, the tennis boom, etc. etc. That artificial attempt to beat back obesity, however, flew in the face of growing time pressure as women entered the labor force in larger numbers. In addition to the time it takes, exercise for the sake of exercise isn’t fun, and so detracts from one’s quality of life. Getting exercise by playing a game is one enjoyable; running two miles in the same place over and over again, as I used to do before I had kids, is not. More recently, I get the feeling that people have just given up on fighting the losing fight.
With today’s non-physical occupations, the trip to work is the only time of the day where normal-course-of-events exercise can be added back into the American schedule. And riding the approximately 150 minutes per day, or 450 to 600 per week, burns far more calories that the running I did in my 20s. And, since it takes the place of other commuting, it takes far less time. Perhaps if I had started bicycling to work at age 25 I would still weigh 185 rather than 225. So despite the danger of a traffic accident, I’ve decided to try to convince my teenage children to start getting around by bicycle. It might benefit them later on in life far more than learning to drive.
Had commuting by bicycle been common, or if it had occurred to me to organize my life around it, twenty years ago, it might have also affected where we chose to live, given our personal financial objectives. Our goal was and is to be “semi-independently wealthy,” to live modestly enough to get by on one salary not matter how modestly that was, using the second income for savings, then savings and charity (and of course lots of taxes given that the second salary is taxed at higher marginal rates). Living cheap and staying semi-independently wealthy has provided enormous benefits over and above financial security, including the flexibility for my wife and I to work part time when the children were infants and pre-schoolers, and for me to take time from work to launch my Don Quixote run for public office in 2004. Nothing we could have bought would have been worth giving up those benefits.
The key to achieving semi-independent wealth status was to minimize the two biggest household expenses — housing and transportation. That meant only renting and then buying the minimum amount of space we needed to be comfortable, and living without a car in a place where the subway could be used to get to work and just about everything else was available within walking distance. (We now have a car, but use it only on weekends). Not only is that low-cost lifestyle not available in most of the United States, it isn’t even available in most of New York City. Living without a car in neighborhoods such as eastern Queens or the Southern Rim of Brooklyn was out of the question. The parent of friend suggested that we buy a house in Marine Park, where he lives, but adding a bus ride to the subway rather than a short walk would simply have taken too much time. A former boss advised buying a house in Forest Hills Queens, but whereas in Windsor Terrace we are a short walk from both the subway and Prospect Park, in Forest Hills one could be a short walk from the Queens Boulevard Line or Forest Park, but not both.
Relative real estate prices, however, are far different today than they were 25 years ago. Then, places with direct access to mass transit also had lower real estate costs per square foot (outside of Manhattan anyway), because middle-income people saw the subway as a means for poor people with criminal intent to get to one’s neighborhood. People with those attitudes are still around – they are the ones fighting against congestion pricing –but they are a shrinking minority. Today housing rents and sales prices are much higher per square foot in economically viable places with a rail transit stop within walking distance, as transit access is seen as a key amenity. The relative supply of and demand for the two types of places, transit- and pedestrian-oriented versus auto-oriented, has completely reversed, as I discussed here. Today, therefore, the money saved by walking and taking transit to things may be lost due to higher housing prices.
Because a person on a bicycle moves at three times the speed of someone walking, however, the same level of accessibility I sought 20-plus years ago in Windsor Terrace, Brooklyn can be had in places with one-third the density, and three times the distance to a transit stop. A tolerable half mile walk to a subway or commuter rail station is a tolerable 1.5 mile bicycle ride to a subway or commuter rail station, or perhaps even a tolerable two-or three-mile bicycle ride if that ride is counted as one’s exercise for the day as well as part of the trip to work. This bicycle, therefore, opens up vastly more areas of the city, and indeed the metropolitan region, to the no-car and one-car lifestyle, including areas that are now cheaper and might become cheaper still. Particularly within the city if differential state budget cuts and the recent diversion of NYC education funds to earlier retirement finishes off the city’s schools once and for all.
Even for those in close-in neighborhoods, the wider range afforded by the bicycle may become essential to living here in an era of institutional collapse. The greed of older generations, expressed through by state legislature in part through the massive MTA debt, makes it likely that the scheduled maintenance and ongoing normal replacement that have led to the recovery of our transit system will soon be coming to an end. With debt service and pensions eating more and more of the budget, bus service will be cut back, since for those transferring to the subway, the free transfer Metrocard has effectively cut bus revenue to zero for those in the former two-fare zones. And once the MTA stops fixing what is not yet broke, entire subway lines are likely to be out of service for days, weeks, months or even years at a time, the way half of the Manhattan Bridge was shut down for 20 years. That will certainly be the case if the MTA goes through a back-door privatization via bankruptcy, and the transit system ends up in the hands of bondholders trying to squeeze what money they can from the system.
Even if they could not ride all the way to the office or shop, bicycle riders would still be able to find out which subway or rail lines are running on a given day, and then ride to the nearest station on an alternate line of theirs is shut down. And they would be able to live in neighborhoods where bus service has become so infrequent, and the buses so unreliable and crowded, that they are no longer viable.
Getting around by bicycle, therefore, is a way that my children and others in younger generations in general might be able to avoid the fate that Pataki, Silver, Bruno, Giuliani, the lobbyists who backed them in exchange for goodies I the past, and their generation in general have otherwise condemned them too. Refusing to pay back the MTA debts and pensions, and riding a bicycle, could be a way to hit back in what has otherwise been a very one-sided generational war. In the case of the transit system, the bicycle — perhaps combined with telecommuting in bad weather — is a way to ride around the institutional collapse.