You’ll see that most trips are not for commuting but for personal (haircut, doctor) and shopping (grocery, clothes) reasons. Additionally, the average American driver makes 4 trips a day (87% of trips are by personal automobile) and drives 29 miles.

One strategy non-motorized transportation advocates are trying is to educate people about the health benefits and monetary savings of taking some of those trips and having them completed by walking or bicycling.

When you say “leave the floor the way it was”, that was not viable. The previous condition included moldy carpet laid over old vinyl tile which itself stank, was falling apart and covered in carpet adhesive. Underneath the vinyl tile was an old asphalt-based adhesive that was itself difficult to remove, although some mortars could be used to put a new floor over top it.

I also used a bike to haul away some the old floor waste to the landfill, including one load with a total weight of 540 lbs:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/markstos/4590857686/

But it doesn’t matter, because New York’s pre-automobile bridges were all built to support trolleys. They’re safe with cars, and they’re going to be safe with bicycles, pedestrians, and buses.

What’s more than linear in weight is road wear, which is not the same as bridge strength. Road wear is proportional to the fourth power of axle load, which means that a 65-kg person riding a 15-kg bicycle contributes 1/400,000th as much to road wear as a person driving in a 2,000-kg car.

It is probably much more than a linear effect but a simple linear example would be that a bridge required to hold a 2500 pound vehicle requires 100 times the amount of material of a bridge that is required to carry a 25 pound vehicle and every bridge there after.

According to the Nationwide Personal Transportation Survey, 25 percent of all trips are made within a mile of the home, 40 percent of all trips are within two miles of the home, and 50 percent of the working population commutes five miles or less to work. Yet more than 82 percent of trips five miles or less are made by personal motor vehicle.

Perhaps the most underrated cargo-moving device is the simple two-wheeled shopping cart my grandmother used. She packed it at the grocery store and wheeled it home, and straight into the kitchen. No need for help with carrying the groceries from the car to the kitchen.

Also, I think the real way most people deal with this problem of running close-to-home errands is to stop at the store ON THE WAY to or from work. IE: Most of the time, they are generally not leaving their home, driving one mile to the store, and then driving back home. They are driving 10-20 miles back from work, and stopping by the store on their way home. It saves tons of time compared to coming home, getting on the bike, then going back out again.

To use myself as an example, if I need to run a close-to-home errand on the weekend, I usually bike. But if it’s during the weekday, I just schedule the errand for on my way to work or on my way home.

Gasoline is an amazingly dense carrier of energy. One single gallon contains the equivalent of 120 hours of human labor. If we were to pay at the pump the value of its human labor equivalent, gasoline in San Francisco would cost $1175 per gallon. Having run through half–the easy half–of the earth’s supply of oil, we really should only be using it now for heavy machinery such as tractors and bulldozers because our grandchildren are going to be hard-pressed to find a substitute. They will marvel at how we squandered 500 million years of geological heritage on such frivolous uses in so short of span and poisoned the earth while we were at it.

For more info on peak oil:

http://scitizen.com/future-energies/do-texas-and-the-north-sea-foretell-the-future-of-oil-production-_a-14-3388.html

A good video on our predicament, Blind Spot (watch for free on this link):

http://www.snagfilms.com/films/title/blind_spot/