Biking For Fun And Profit

CityRyde's Jason Meinzer proposes that cities should try to monetize the benefit of riding a bike. He spoke with TreeHugger's A.K. Streeter:

One day I was reading the statistic how the Paris bike share program had reduced car trips by 8 percent in one year, and that's attributed to bike sharing, and then, it hit us - why shouldn't we be able to have revenue streams through carbon offset programs. Those bicycles trips are proven to displace carbon, there's a savings that can be quantified with precise precision, and then aggregated and certified and sold on on the open commodieties market place.

Felix Salmon runs the numbers.

(Photo: Frederic J Brown/AFP/Getty Images)