Tuesday, April 10, 2007

Another Reason to Ride Your Bicycle

Besides saving gas by riding your bicycle - the exercise will help you lose weight or maintain a healthy weight. Healthy for you and healthy for the planet.
Read "Weight gain of U.S. drivers has increased nation's fuel consumption by James E. Kloeppel HERE

CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — As American waistlines have expanded since 1960, so has their consumption of gasoline, researchers at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Virginia Commonwealth University say.

Americans are now pumping 938 million gallons of fuel more annually than they were in 1960 as a result of extra weight in vehicles. And when gas prices average $3 a gallon, the tab for overweight people in a vehicle amounts to $7.7 million a day, or $2.8 billion a year.

The numbers are added costs linked directly to the extra drain of body weight on fuel economy. In a paper to appear in the October-December issue of the journal The Engineering Economist, the scientists conclude that each extra pound of body weight in all of today’s vehicles results in the need for more than 39 million gallons of extra gasoline usage each year.

Read the rest HERE

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