Walking or Cycling to Nearby Places, Instead of Driving, Can Go a Long Way towards Reducing Your Carbon Footprint

If you are looking to both green up your lifestyle and maintain your health, you can do both with a simple eco-friendly switch. Fueling some of your transportation with human power is doubly beneficial, since it can reduce both your carbon footprint and your waistline.

Short Trips in Your Car Hurt the Environment the Most
Our use of motorized transportation contributes to greenhouse gas more that any other human activity. On average, each liter of fuel that is consumed to run a car engine creates 2.5 kg of CO2. And short journeys are the worst. Very brief trips in the car don’t allow your engine time to warm up and run efficiently; and driving on a cold engine is less fuel efficient and produces a disproportionately large amount of CO2.

Green Transportation Helps You Feel Good
Walking and biking are two of the healthiest forms of transportation, both for yourself and for the earth. Neither contributes to the build-up of greenhouse gasses, and both are low-impact forms of exercise that just about anyone can do, no license required. Ideally, each of us should be getting about a half an hour of exercise every day, but few do. It’s not always easy to find time to work out. But exercise is easier to get done if you make it a purposeful part of you daily life, a way to get from point A to point B.

Deciding When to Walk, Bike or Use Motorized Transportation
If you are interested in making healthy changes to your mobility, first examine the different routes that your routinely drive for work, socializing and doing errands. Then determine if any of those trips can be made on foot or by bike. Do any of the short routes you travel have safe pathways for walkers and bikers? Choosing to walk instead of drive is an excellent mode of transportation when you need to go short distances and don’t have to haul anything cumbersome or heavy. When you need to travel moderate distances (a few to several miles), or when you need to haul a few things with you, a bike is the perfect green machine.

A Little Green Goes a Long Way
If these changes sound appealing, but a bit daunting, start small. By using human power for just a couple of the short trips that you'd normally make by car, you can potentially reduce your CO2 contribution to global warming by hundreds of kilograms every year!

Have you found effective ways to substitute human power for some of your regular driving? Please comment and let us know which changes have worked for you.