Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy By Elly Blue

Abstract

Berkeley Planning Journal, Volume 27, 2014 Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save the Economy By Elly Blue Microcosm, 2013 Reviewed by Jesus M. Barajas Planning often prioritizes transportation projects based on quantified costs and benefits to the community. Recognizing decision-making standard, in Bikenomics Elly Blue delivers a pro-bike argument with which planners and bicycle activists might be familiar, but she supports this argument with facts and figures that will make city comptrollers take notice. A Portland- based writer and bicycle advocate, Elly Blue backs her claims with research that spans popular blog writing, advocacy organization reports, and academic articles in a way that informs, engages, and entertains. She invites an understanding that individuals, businesses, and cities all benefit from more and safer bicycling in their communities. Bikenomics is largely organized around common refrains about the impossibility of making bicycling a coequal mode in the US transportation system. In the first few chapters, Blue tackles the high cost of automobiles and car ownership relative to the bicycle. Costs are borne, Blue argues, not only by individuals who must spend a high proportion of their income on transportation, but by all taxpayers who must pay the long-term debt incurred by borrowing to build roads. On the other hand, investment in bicycle infrastructure costs a fraction to build and maintain and, as argued later, bring local economic benefits that a new highway interchange cannot. In the remainder of the book, Blue addresses topics common in writing on bicycling, but, unlike other journalistic and advocacy pieces, she focuses explicitly on quantifying costs and benefits. For example, in the chapter titled “Superhighway to Health,” Blue describes the interrelationship between lack of access to healthy food, chronic disease, and sedentary lifestyles, asserting that a bicycle-based lifestyle could improve health outcomes and reduce total health-care costs. In a later chapter, Blue relates how two companies that paid employees to bicycle to work saw productivity gains and health-insurance-premium savings that exceeded the amount of the incentives. She approaches bike sharing, bike parking, and the economic impact of bicycling on local businesses similarly in order to build a case for the bicycle as a savior of the economy. One of the most important contributions of Bikenomics is its consistent, explicit emphasis on equity issues in bicycling. Some equity issues