Project Drawdown has characterized a set of 93 technologies and practices that together can reduce concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. It’s a gigantic project with a lot of data and analyses.
In the linked video, the author goes through the measures to find which one is the most cost effective in terms of ratio of rCO2 reduction and economic cost
The maybe surprising result is that building bike infrastructure to shift a not even big percentage of travels from cars to bicycles or ebikes, is very cheap and has a huge effect on emissions.
The premise is that all solutions should be implemented to have a significant effect, but some are easier done than other.
Interesting. Unlike most measures, bike lanes are also a positive on their own, climate change or not. I assume this analysis doesn’t include negative-cost solutions like carbon pricing.
I would love to have bike lanes everywhere. Even if it takes me 45 min to ride to work I’d do it. It’s a plus for not only the environment, but my health. Win win.
I did a ~11 mile (17km) commute for a couple years even in our nasty winters (I live in the US Rockies). I had a bike path the whole way with only 3 intersections (one protected by a light).
My current job is just too far away (25 miles; ~40km) and transit would take ~2 hours. If I could get it to an hour, I’d take transit + bike. Right now, the fastest route is ~10 miles cycling (3 to the station, 7 to work) and would take a bit more than an hour, and the station to work trip is a little sketchy. It’s also way more expensive than driving (~$5 each way for the train, $3-4 total for gas), which takes only 30 min, so I’d spend twice the money and twice the time to get to work by transit+bike.
According to the video, bike infra, on its own, looking only up to 2050, is already economically positive (the return is higher than upfront building construction), because of the money saved on car infra that needs lots of mainteinance.
If you include social and health benefits it becomes even much better.
I guess that carbon princing is already considered as a separate climate crisis solution in the project drawdown set.