This is the post where I tell you about new consulting services I’m offering to promote bike commuting. If you wanna skip to the goods, check out my new site.

It’s time to ask the hard questions of ourselves, our employers, and our colleagues. Why are bike commuting rates so low? I think it comes down to people being so entrenched in the status quo that they cannot see another way. Just under half of employees live within 10 miles of their office and yet bike commuting rates are dismal. Even in Minneapolis, where we have the second most bike commuters of any major city, only 4.6% of folks commute by bike. There’s a huge opportunity to promote health by changing the way people get to and from work.

Most major employers have a wellness division. Usually housed under human resources, this is the department that will plan walking challenges, send out flyers on healthy behavior, organize health fairs and screenings, and give you resources for health promotion courses. In my experience as an employee, these challenges are merely lip service to the idea of wellness. Some people get into them, yes. Some employees will buy hand weights and new shoes, taking the lunch hour to walk around the parking lot. Some employees will take more walks at home with their friends and families to make sure they’re getting their steps in for the day. Some employees will park farther from the store entrance or decide to walk to a coworker’s desk instead of emailing as a way to walk a bit more. All of these are great outcomes. These challenges can be fun, but it’s very unlikely that most of them are impacting health beyond the duration of the challenge.

I worked at a pharmacy after I finished my undergraduate degree. It was my first big-kid job and I still remember it fondly. At the time, I’d never been regularly physically active. I was 22 and slender; I’d always associated working out with losing weight. While I worked at the pharmacy, the wellness division coordinated walking challenges. I participated, for the cheap plastic rewards, but I still remember taking pride in telling my coworkers who exercised that I “didn’t need to.” Eventually hearing them talk about time at the gym wore me down and I joined one myself. I exercised religiously until I thought to bike commute. That was the beginning of the end of my gym life. And thank god for it, because spending hours upon hours, day after day, staring out the same gym window while swinging my arms on the same elliptical remains my idea of hell.

Bike commuting made sense for me then and makes sense for me now. It’s a way to be physically active without having to try too hard to be physically active. Commuting by bike is associated with better mental health and reduces cardiovascular risk. Bike commuters live an average of two years longer, breathe in less pollution, take fewer sick days, and are just plain happier with their commutes. Folks who commute by car are more likely to gain weight over time than those who commute by bike, even when they are physically active in their free time. Promoting active commuting is cost effective. Getting people to incorporate physical activity into their everyday routines is much cheaper than enrolling folks in targeted physical activity classes.

So then, how do we do it? How do we encourage people to take the leap and figure out the bike commuting thing? Well, it’s clear that bike commuting isn’t an option for everyone. Folks who live long distances away from work may struggle to bike commute, although e-bikes may extend commute range. Parents may find it hard to coordinate daycare drop-off and pick-up on a bicycle, although it’s very doable if you have the right set-up. And employees with disabilities or chronic disease may not be able to bike commute due to physical limitations. All of those things are okay, those are not the people I’m talking about.

I’m talking about people like my old coworker B. He lives nine miles from work and his route is almost a straight-shot to the office along the greenway. He didn’t have a bike and hadn’t biked in ages. He said that seeing my bike parked in the office every day made him realize that he had no reason for driving every day. He bought a bike and started riding it to work. Over the ensuing months he lost around thirty pounds. While B is a great guy, I don’t think he’s particularly special in his relationship to commuting. He drove to work because driving to work is how he’d always conceived of commuting. Eventually, he saw that biking to work was a feasible option, a better option.

There are ways to promote bike commuting that work. Doing this in the work environment makes perfect sense, because everyone has to get to work. Instead of giving out gift cards when employees see the dentist (or hell, in addition to gift cards for employees seeing the dentist), why not use strategies that have been shown to increase bike commuting rates? Achieving lasting health means building healthy habits and bike commuting is a powerful habit. We can improve bike commuting rates through the creation of bike-to-work events, leading bike trains so people don’t have to first-time commute on their own, writing targeted guides and information about how to bike commute, conducting surveys to understand barriers, and changing company policies and amenities to be more friendly to bike commuters. I’m now offering all of these as consulting services. Promoting bike commuting should be a public health priority. It has the potential to be very powerful. If your company is interested, drop me a line.