Our Motorized Life
We all know that commuting in a car is bad for our health and the environment. I would like to take it one step further and claim that most motors that make our lives easier are bad for our health and the environment. From the automatic doors that grant us entrance into massively air-conditioned buildings to the little electric scooters that allow people to zoom around downtown areas, motors big and small are sabotaging our health.
Let’s start off by taking elevators, for example. Every time you take the elevator, you skip the stairs. The opportunity cost of that is immense. Compounded daily, over a year, how many steps and stairs do you miss? Why should you care? Stairs are just a minor inconvenience, right? Wrong. People are missing out on massive health benefits. Physical activity should be incorporated into every aspect of our lives. Especially for people who spend eight hours sitting at a desk five days a week.
Climbing eight flights of stairs per day decreases average early mortality risk by 33%. Two extra minutes of stair climbing per day can stop middle-age weight gain in its tracks. Stair climbing is classified as a cardiovascular exercise, it can get your heart pumping and your blood flowing. This decreases your chance of high blood pressure, clogged arteries, and weight gain. In turn, your chances of having a chronic illness like diabetes or heart disease also decreases. All from just deciding to take the stairs every day.
You don’t have to charge up the stairs like a sweaty high school football player charging up the metal seats of stadiums while being yelled at by a balding coach, but you should absolutely imagine being yelled at every time you chose to take the lazy-lift (a.k.a., the elevator). The self-discipline required to overcome the temptation of the stairs, or even other quick-fixes in life that supposedly make it easier, is an added benefit. Elevators are great for people in wheelchairs and reaching the 102nd floor in the Empire State Building (even then, walk up the first ten floors and then take the lazy-lift). Stairs should always be the default. It is vital to your health. Take the stairs. Avoid the elevator.
I know there are a million excuses for why people avoid the stairs. Off the top of my head, I can remember a particularly unpleasant time when I took the stairs in a parking garage in downtown Austin, TX during the heights of heat and humidity in August. It was swelteringly hot, I was carrying many heavy bags of free stuff from a convention I had just attended, the stairwell was lit by ugly fluorescent lights and cluttered with trash. It wasn’t a pleasant experience. I was tempted to take the elevator. But I didn’t. I bit the bullet and took it one step at a time, by the time I reached the 5th floor of the parking garage the straps on my bags were cutting into my arms, I was sweaty, my heart was racing, and I was triumphantly glad I had done it.
Can I blame the City of Austin for having ugly, poorly designed stairwells? Absolutely. They should design their city in a way that promotes active living. Can I blame them when I develop heart disease because I motorized all aspects of my life? No. Your health is on you. The minute you try to shift the blame or responsibility of your health to someone other than yourself is the minute your arteries start to clog, and your wallet starts to be drained by the pharmaceutical companies of corporate America.
Now let’s briefly look at cars and commuting. A U.K. study of more than 34,000 workers found that people with a long commute to work are more likely to suffer from depression, work-related stress, and financial worries. When compared to those with short commutes (half an hour or less), people with a long commute are 46 percent more likely to get less than 7 hours of sleep per night. They are 21 percent more likely to be obese. Also, commutes of more than 10 miles each way lead to higher blood sugar and higher cholesterol according to an article published in The American Journal of Preventive Medicine.
In my opinion, nobody should be commuting. Those statistics are scary, and that is not even mentioning the depreciation of your vehicle or the constant threat of traffic accidents. We should all strive to live within walking distance to our jobs. However, I admit this can be difficult for many people, especially if their jobs are in a downtown area where rent or housing pricing increase dramatically. But, I challenge you to look at it differently. For every mile you drive, you pay for the gas, insurance, oil, and vehicle. According to the American Automobile Association, to own and operate a new vehicle will cost, on average, almost $8,500 annually. That price rises to $10,054 if you own a pickup truck and drops to $6,354 if you own a small sedan.
If you shift the cost of owning a vehicle towards a mortgage instead, what is that worth? If you take a typical family, with two parents who both own a vehicle and subtract just one car, that leaves them with about $8,500 more per year. If you get rid of both, that’s an extra $17,000. If that extra money is applied to a mortgage, then how much closer to work can you afford to live?
“I have to drive to work because I live ten miles away!” is the rallying cry of people across the cities of the United States. “Well,” I say, “Move closer to work.” Walk or bike to work. Use public transportation. Take the bus but get off a stop or two early and walk! When you stop commuting by car, you discover that walking is a great way to maintain your health. I do not believe enough people walk in America. The American Heart Association recommends that able-bodied adults walk for at least 30 minutes, five times per week. Many medical studies have been done on the benefits of walking, one even found that walking regularly cuts the risk of cardiovascular events, like heart attacks, by 31 percent. The cardiovascular and health benefits of walking include lower risks of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, obesity, vascular stiffness and inflammation, peripheral artery disease, colon cancer, and even erectile dysfunction. The benefits of walking or biking to work are not only physical, but walking also lowers the risk of depression, anxiety, dementia, and other forms of mental stress or illness.
As a college student, I live five miles from campus. What that means for me is that I walk twenty minutes to the nearest bus stop, ride the bus for 20 minutes, and then walk to class. At the end of my day, I repeat the process in reverse. It takes me about 45 minutes to get where I want to go, but I fill that time with listening to podcasts, reading books, working on my homework, or even browsing social media. I could take my car, it would reduce my commute to just 15 minutes if I drove during non-peak hours, but when faced with all the health benefits of walking, why would I want to?
We have examined how elevators and cars are ruining our health. But what about other little, seemingly inconsequential things with motors? Surely, most of those things are good.
For example, what about automatic doors? Well, when they are the only option, of course, you use them. However, keep in mind that when the automatic doors are off to the side and intended only for people who really need them, i.e. people in wheelchairs, they should be avoided. Use your arms muscles, those atrophied biceps, and pull or push the door open. There is no reason to opt for the automatic door when you are perfectly capable of this activity yourself. Defaulting to automatic doors is a symptom of a larger problem, laziness.
Air conditioning is something else that unintentionally harms us. Where I live in Texas, we have two seasons. Humid, hot summer and then a few weeks of something other states might call winter. Air conditioning is vital to the survival of many people, especially elderly people. But what are the effects of constantly subjecting your body to such extremes? If you keep your home at 72 degrees Fahrenheit, and the weather outside is in the upper 80s, you will never acclimatize. Your body will not adjust to the weather. You will constantly be either too hot or too cold. That’s not good for us.
Electric scooters have recently become popular in Austin, TX. They offer an easy, convenient way to get around quickly. But the real tragedy of the electric scooter comes from the missed health opportunity. Zooming around on a scooter may be fun, but the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease and walking significantly decreases your risk of heart disease. So, if you don’t mind dying from a weak heart, by all means, keep zooming around on those “fun” scooters.
I’ve listed all these ways in which motors are ruining our health, but what about the environment? After all, I claim that motors ruin both.
Electric Scooters are able to seemingly avoid the pitfalls of environmental degradation if you ask the average person. But electricity in most cities comes from non-renewable sources. Energy in Austin, TX comes mainly from gas and coal powered power plants. Electric scooters still need to be charged, and chances are they aren’t being powered by west Texas wind farms. Elevators are also powered by electricity, so unless your city runs on 100 percent renewable energy, like solar or wind, then this is another reason they should be avoided.
The United States subsidizes the cost of gas for its consumers. Cheaper gas means that more is consumed, and more pollution fills the air. The pollution emitted from motor vehicles is made up of four parts; carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter. The Environmental Protection Agency says that motor vehicles cause 75 percent of carbon monoxide pollution in the states. And before China took the throne in 2008, the United States was considered the world’s biggest polluter in terms of carbon dioxide.
Motors may make our lives easier and more efficient but the true cost of living our lives dependent on them is staggering. I am not suggesting we all go back to pre-industrial times and live like our ancestors. That would be ridiculous. What I hope to have accomplished with this is article is more of an awakening of the awareness of the pervasiveness of motors in our lives and how they are secretly sabotaging our health. We as a society need to be aware of hidden dangers like this that exist in our day to day lives. Heart disease is absolutely the number one killer in the U.S., and our health care system spends an obscene amount of money treating diseases like diabetes and obesity. Simple activities like walking to work and taking the stairs may seem like common sense, but if that were really true then the health profile of America would be dramatically different.
Pay attention to your everyday choices. Be active. Take the stairs.
References
Brinson, L. (2015). How much air pollution comes from cars?. Retrieved from https://auto.howstuffworks.com/air-pollution-from-cars.htm
EPA. (2018). Smog, Soot, and Other Air Pollution from Transportation | US EPA. Retrieved from https://www.epa.gov/transportation-air-pollution-and-climate-change/smog-soot-and-local-air-pollution
Jockey, S. (2017). Stair Challenges | The Health Benefits of Stair Climbing. Retrieved from https://www.stepjockey.com/health-benefits-of-stair-climbing
Kylstra, C. (2014). http://time.com. Retrieved from http://time.com/9912/10-things-your-commute-does-to-your-body/
Mustache, M. (2018). The True Cost of Commuting. Retrieved from http://www.mrmoneymustache.com/2011/10/06/the-true-cost-of-commuting/
Publishing, H. (2018). Walking: Your steps to health — Harvard Health. Retrieved from https://www.health.harvard.edu/staying-healthy/walking-your-steps-to-health
Smith, R. (2017). Here’s the impact long commutes have on your health and productivity. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/long-commutes-have-an-impact-on-health-and-productivity-2017-5
Stepp, E. (2017). Driving cost per mile Archives — AAA NewsRoom. Retrieved from https://newsroom.aaa.com/tag/driving-cost-per-mile/
