Jupiter Images
Yesterday I decided to leave the car and walk the quarter mile to the shop, as suggested by the doc. What I discovered has put me right off and I'll walk in the park from now, thanks.
The problem is traffic exhaust. From even my gentle stroll I could really feel it in my lungs and it occurred to me I was doing more harm than good.
It then struck me that cyclists do the same thing only with their hearts pounding and lungs working full pelt. Surely this can't be good. Has any research been done?
![Polling Station signage [Image: kagey b under CC-BY-NC-ND licence]](/openlearn/files/ole/ole_images/places/general-urban-scenes/polling-station-sign/polling station sign_0_0.jpg)
Login or Register to post comments
Is cycling good for you
Yesterday I decided to leave the car and walk the quarter mile to the shop, as suggested by the doc. What I discovered has put me right off and I'll walk in the park from now thanks. The problem is traffic exhaust. From even my gentle stroll I could really feel it in my lungs and it occurred to me I was doing more harm than good.
It then struck me that cyclists do the same thing only with their hearts pounding and lungs working full pelt. Surely this can't be good. Has any research been done?
Re: Is cycling good for you
Knew those fumes were bad for you.
Re: Is cycling good for you
Who's breathing fumes? I avoid towns and busy roads like the plague.
Re: Is cycling good for you
I don't want to make anyone do anything. Joggers run the same risks as cyclists. When I'm driving I try to recirculate the air in the car rather than draw in fresh. It also helps that I'm not having a cardio workout in the car. The motorbike is best of all as I never seem to be stuck behind anything.
Although it contradicts not "making anyone do anything" I would be tempted to ban the rolling accident blackspots that are cyclists and joggers.
Re: Is cycling good for you
Cyclists should have to have insurance with premiums reflecting how dangerous they are, and tax them as well. Also a license so kids can't cycle on the road.
Re: Is cycling good for you
As a cyclist, I'd love to see a tax on cyclists, but only if all subsidies on car travel are removed so that drivers have to pay the full cost of the hell they have created. It has been calculated that a sensible level of tax for cyclists would be so low that it would cost far more to collect it than it would take in, but it would be worth it if the planet-wrecking thieves in cars had to pay their way.
As for the danger that irresponsible cyclists cause to other pedestrians, I've always thought that it should be legal to stick a brolly or walking stick through someone's front wheel if they cycle past you on a pavement or across a pedestrian crossing while the lights are red: if they are thrown off by this it would be entirely their own fault.
I didn't know goats riding bikes were a problem.
Re: Is cycling good for you
What subsidies? Killing someone for cycling? A lame attempt at humour? I bet you hammer about in yellow lycra.
Re: Is cycling good for you
Massive amounts of public money are spent on building unnecessary and immoral roads.
Where do you get that from?
No attempt at humour: I hate the word "kids" being applied to humans.
No way: that's only for the leaders of big tours.
Re: Is cycling good for you
Roads are necessary, including bypasses through any given habitat. We live in an car/transport based society and most public money comes from this. Road tax, fuel tax, VAT and registration tax. Then we have speed cameras, parking meters, parking fines and road tolls. Next up is income tax from rig workers, merchant seamen,refinery workers, tanker drivers, forecourt staff, traffic wardens, carpark attendants and service station staff. Also mechanics and car salesmen. Then we have all delivery workers and the list really is endless so I have to stop, but ask yourself how close your job is to the transport sector. Immoral?
poking a stick through someone's spokes could well end in death
I don't believe you
Chicken post got that one. And why would you be a 20 st lardie just because you don't cycle or think cyclists are daft?
Re: Is cycling good for you
Best place for a cycling bear is the circus.
Re: Is cycling good for you
You called yourself Teddy Merckx, so I take it you mean yourself. I took my lead from you and picked an ursine version of another famous cyclist's name, as mis-heard by a spectator watching the TDF on TV.
Re: Is cycling good for you
ho-hum... ...de-tum de-tum
Re: Is cycling good for you
Most new roads are totally unnecessary. It's not transporting goods around that causes the real problem, although it could be done massively more efficiently: it's the cars that cause the problem, always making unnecessary journeys. People should live near to where they work and they should have their shopping delivered.
Which is speeding us towards hell. It's all about to come crashing down.
It devours public money.
Don't come close to covering the costs.
Trivial addition.
And what are they needed for? To keep a highly unpleasant and unsustainable way of life going.
A quarter of the work force are doing fake work that doesn't need to be done. Another quarter could be working from home. As you've pointed out, many other jobs are tied up in maintaining an unnecessary transport system in a whole variety of ways: we would be better off without them. Thanks to an idiot called Jeremy Clarkson, most of you are also driving machines that could have won an early Formula 1 race: you've poisoned the planet so much that you're soon going to have to have your cars taken away from you whether you like it or not.
It's hard to avoid when almost everyone else it tied up in it: I haven't been in a car for years, but most of the people who buy my work obviously have. Unless I grow my own food, I depend on that being transported by some means or other, though I do get local food wherever possible. I do the best I can in the situation you have put me in, and I can't be blamed for the things I can't control. I don't have and never will have a car and my work helps other people to work from home. If they continue to use a car for other purposes, that is their fault and not mine.
Cycling at speed between pedestrians on pavements and crossings sometimes does result in death, and only rarely for the cyclist: these antisocial people who give decent cyclists a bad name need to be encouraged to behave more responsibly, and the thought that someone could legally stick something through their front wheel if they cycle past on the pavement or a crossing at high speed would put an end to that kind of behaviour without injuring anyone.
I assume you mean the bit about humour? I don't do humour: billions of people will starve to death because of selfish people like you and I don't find that funny at all.
I never linked the two things: it was your description of normal, healthy people as strangled chickens that made me assume you thought 50 stone blubber balls were the standard to measure up to.
Re: Is cycling good for you
so you do look like a strangled chicken but not in yellow?
Re: Is cycling good for you
Is that how you see athletes? Are you a Sumo fan perhaps? Maybe you think it's normal for people to be as fat as Konishiki (50 stone and with twenty buttocks).
Re: Is cycling good for you
Silly me, I just put Pollution London cyclists into my main page and it seems that the problem is well known. The first page to come up, treehugger documents the effects and advertises masks!
Why don't people wear them? It must be that cyclists are as stupid as smokers, whom, upon reading the "SMOKING KILLS" legend, decide that they are magic and it doesn't apply to them.
Maybe that's the trick, a health warning or compulsory mask law.
Re: Is cycling good for you
What about joggers then? You wan't to make them wear masks too? What about people in cars where the pollution can be sucked in at low altitude from the exhaust fumes of the bus in front and concentrated? The smaller particulates (the most dangerous ones) go straight though masks anyway.
The better the mask, the harder it is to breathe through it, so if you wear a really good one, you won't be able to breathe hard enough to go at any real speed anyway. Slow cycling uses less energy than walking too, so most cyclists actually breathe less hard than walkers and because they spend less time getting from A to B, they may be reducing their exposure to the worst polution at the same time. Maybe the best answer's just to make everyone in a town wear a mask at all times: the pollution gets into their homes too, so they should never take them off.
Of course, we could just get rid of all the motor vehicles that cause the problem and which make it take forever to get about within cities. But no: that wouldn't do at all because it would completely solve the problem, and people never seem to like solutions to problems because it gives them less to moan about.
Re: Is cycling good for you
Thanks for your opinion. I'll have to see if I can find said program. What type of pollution detector was it? I would think only a face mask/detector would be satisfactory.
I didn't ask if cyclists went through strain and don't quite know what you mean by it. Some cyclists I see don't put much effort in granted, most put in a moderate amount and some push the limits. Maybe strain has a cyclist defined meaning or another general meaning I'm unaware of.
If you seen the Top Gear cross London race(motorbike surely),you will know the type of cycling I was referring to. If Hammond had been wearing a detector/mask that would be worth looking at.
Re: Is cycling good for you
I recently watched a TV program on i think it was bbc 1 and it was about pollution. It showed a scientist cycling through the busiest part of London. She wore a pollution indicator to tell her how much pollution she would be breathing in. It was a very low concentration of pollution in the air and the only time that there was an amount that could damage her in the long run was when she was stuck in traffic behind a lorry. So in answer to your question, no, cyclists don't go through strain whilst cycling.