As any community cycling shop mechanic will tell you, there are plenty of advantages to traveling a city by bike: it's cheaper and greener than taking the car or train, and a lot easier to maintain.
Those gallons of gas and the coal burned to power trains adds up — transportation was the largest source of greenhouse gas emissions in 2016, according to Environmental Protection Agency statistics. Most transportation-related emissions come from cars, pickup trucks, minivans and SUVs.
Bike rental programs in America’s cities are starting to make the option of short-term green alternatives readily available to environmentally conscious commuters, but they usually only afford commuters a trip measured in minutes.
Karen Overton, director of educational nonprofit Recycle-a-Bicycle, itself a part of Bike New York, stressed that owning and maintaing a bicycle is one way to lessen overall air pollution and overreliance on gasoline and coal.
“We can change that level of [air] pollution by changing your transportation patterns,” Overton said. “You don’t have to radically change your whole life — just one individual behavior, and sustain that change.”
Below, David Heslop of Recycle-a-Bicycle explains five ways anyone can maintain their own bicycle without going to a repair shop, making the sustainable commuting method even cheaper.
