All you savvy motorbike riders out there know that riding your bike to work gives you much more freedom than sitting in a car jammed up in a motorway queue day after day. That’s right, I’m talking about everybody’s favourite time of day….the dreaded rush hour. Well, a study conducted in Belgium has proven what bikers have been saying for years; if more people rode bikes, journey times would be significantly reduced!
The study focused on motorway traffic between Leuven and Brussels which is roughly a ten mile trip. It showed that if just one in ten commuters switched from a car to a bike, congestion would ease for everybody and traffic flow would be greatly increased; in fact, the effects are so good that the remaining 90% of road users found they arrived at their destination an average of eight minutes earlier and that was travelling during the peak rush hour!
On average, the number of ‘lost vehicle hours’ ( in other words, the time when you’re sitting in a traffic jam going nowhere fast) was slashed from a total of 1,925 hours to 706 hours over an average day, that’s pretty impressive! As if that wasn’t good enough, travelling less means less fuel emissions and consumptions so more money in your pocket – everyone’s a winner!
The science behind the project concluded that as traffic builds and comes to a standstill, motorbikes are able to filter through traffic and so theoretically don’t take up any space on the road, as a result, the amount of vehicles sitting still is reduced! So , when you’re whizzing by all those drives sat in a queue, you can be as smug as you like knowing they will be thanking you later for saving them time… that’ the theory anyway!
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