A bicycle Ride Dilemma.

Couple of weeks back I got my self a bicycle [Brand name Chicago], and the plan is to ride it to work every day but the burning afternoons of Lahore and my mum both have been very de-motivating, and I have been commuting either on rickshaw (Three wheeler LPG devils) or the diesel beast NO.39 metro bus. Every time I see the birds being scared away by the scary horn of the bus by the road side green, this makes me think about my bicycle more and more, but much recent thoughts have been how environment friendly will I become after riding it to work and how healthy will I get and how green my life style would become.

On June 11, 2008 I rode my bicycle to work, my 30 minutes of journey, started with a serried of calculations, about how many calories I’m going to burn during this journey and how many pounds of carbon dioxide emissions I saved on. Now they say that biking for about 60 minutes at 10 miles per hour should be able to burn 408 calories in a person weighing 160 pounds, now if 4 such trips are made in a week then this should save on 54 gallons of gas per year thus saving 1140 pounds of carbon from entering the environment.

Thus my Green trip to work on a bicycle should help me burn 204 calories one way, while I should be saving on approximately 27 gallons of diesel and LPG along with CNG combined, and this should result into 570 pounds lesser carbon emissions.

Now friends lets enter the black part of the journey while crossing the railway cuttings my thoughts deflected towards the steel used in rail way tracks and a very gloomy realization cropped up and I realized that my own bicycle is made out of steel, rubber and plastic. The production of these materials along with titanium and carbon fiber are a great cause of CO2 emissions to the environment.

Now where do I get a bicycle made out of Bamboos or reclaimed wood?

OR

Keeping the bicycle functional for 20 years might make me eco friendly.

So is riding a bicycle to work is environment friendly or not!

Wee weeeee weeee wa weeee!