What’s Your Solution?
Andy over at Carbon Trace is a big fan of the One Mile Solution. An astonishing proportion of the journeys most people make by car are within less than a mile of where they live, so the solution is to replace a few / some / all of these by walking or riding a bike.
To find those places within your One Mile Solution, you get out a map, find your home, and draw a one-mile radius circle around it. Here’s my One Mile Solution (click to enlarge):
Walking within a mile of home is such a short distance once you get used to it, that it hardly seems worth getting the bike out to ride those trips. Unless you’re in a hurry, that is. My particular favourite is getting to the bank to pay in a big fat cheque from a client, just before they close. It takes me 15 minutes to walk, or about five on the bike - including the time to lock up.
But bikes are convenient for much longer trips than those within a mile of home. For pootling about town trips, a two-mile solution seems eminantly sensible - like this one, which encompasses all of Wife’s errands about town today:
But even that’s no real distance. No sooner have you started to really enjoy the wind on your face, than the trip’s over and you’ve reached your destination. For commuting trips, I have a ten and fifteen mile solution, and I’ve actually written into our environmental policy that all trips within ten miles should be by bike:
This isn’t always practical though (like when carrying a bunch of delicate equipment, or to meet a new client who has an expectation that management consultants wear suits so sharp that you could cut yourself on them), and as roads aren’t arranged radially from my house, the further away my destination, the more the indirectness adds up. That means more time for the journeys (and for me, time really is money some days), which if the weather’s bad, can also mean a really thorough soaking. So my rule is that I should do all trips within the ten mile radius by bike, and that I may do those within fifteen miles, depending on the actual on-road distance.
What do your solutions look like? Or as an engineer, am I just showing my anorak tendencies, and no-one else actually bothers to plot this sort of thing?
Not quite on topic, but i like River City cycles’ “One Day a Week” campaign - aimed at people commuting by car currently, they say why not try a bike commute one day a week?
Much less of a mental hurdle than committing to a bike commute 24/7/365 for most people.
One day a week is an excellent way to start. As Andy says, “Try to replace one car trip per week within that circle by riding a bicycle or walking.” The funny thing is that in nice, sunny spells, it’s just so easy for that one day a week to turn into every day!
To be truly practical, you clearly need a float bike.
How do you get the accurate circly thing on google? or is that an engineer skill? I’m intrigued to see how it works for us.
It never occured to me to do this, mainly because most of my work, shopping and other stuff (90%) is local, and anything else is usually by train. But it’s a good idea to help people get on their bikes or walking.
Carlton is right though, you will neeed a float bike. That’s an interesting thought- how do you take topography into account?
I think for a genuine one-mile solution, topography is largely irrelevant - those places the other side of that river / motorway / railway line that has no bridge are simply out of bounds. It would be nice to have some sort of route planner which would show you the exact perimeter of your
When you expand it up, there are usually alternative routes you can take, but the impact of these is to add extra distance into your trip. The bigger the ’solution radius’, I guess the more pronounced this generally is. It’s for this reason that I also included the actual mileage for some typical destinations on the 10/15 mile images. For me to ride to Wansbeck or Morpeth, it’d have to be a pretty fantastic spring / summer’s day!
I produced the maps by doing a screen grab (shift+cmd+4 on a Mac) from maps.google.co.uk, and then pasting them into a drawing package before adding the circles as over-lays. The scaling of the circles is taken from the little scale symbol in the bottom left of Google’s map images. Like I said, I can be a bit of an anorak about these things . . .
Unfortunately for me, I have to cycle at least five miles before I get to anywhere more useful than a post box. Of course the plus side is it’s on lovely empty roads - low density populations have their upsides. But I could do the 7-mile journey into our nearest town more often, rather than take the car
Hmm, I was thinking as well of the 11 and 15% hills on three sides of the village. There are useful shops and things, even our tax advisor, within a couple of kilometres, but they are on the other side of a deep valley other shops are further away, but over flatter ground so I tens to cycle in a big square and pick up stuff as I go. I think our ’solution’ could look a bit more lumpy on a map. I guess tha main thing though is to be cycling/walking and not driving. We’re achieving that.
Here’s a nifty tool to help with this (for U.S. locations): http://walkscore.com/
And thanks for the how-to on the maps, Karl. I was wonder how to get those nice circles , too
I’ve got a 5 - 10 - 20 rule. I’ll walk 5 minutes, take my bike 10 minutes and multi-mode with bike plus local transit for 20 minutes. Any longer than that and I’ll multi-mode with bike and regional rail.