Could Biking in a City Be Bad for Your Health? | National Geographic

Air pollution is bad for you, and we know that exercise is good for you. But there's this unanswered question: is exercising in close proximity to traffic enough of a bad thing for you that we should be recommending separating biking lanes from traffic altogether?

The challenge with biking in a city is that bikers are breathing heavily in the zone where exhaust is being emitted by motor vehicles. Although motor vehicles have become cleaner over the last 20 or 30 years, they're still not as clean as they need to be, especially when you put people that are exercising right in the close proximity of the exhaust.

The primary goal of the study is to develop and deploy new ways of measuring air pollution. What we're doing is measuring both the concentrations of pollution that people encounter as they move around the city, and we're also measuring people's respiration rate, so the liters per minute of air that they're breathing in. When you multiply those two things together, you get the dose.

We have five things that people wear. So they wear a shirt that measures their minute ventilation, and it measures their heart rate, including their heart rate variability, so the timing of the beats. Then we asked them to wear two air pollution monitors, and then we asked them to wear a blood pressure monitor that automatically takes a measurement every half hour. Finally, during the ride, we asked them to log their location using a GPS device.

So we have 2 years to work out all the bugs and prove that we can make all the measurements that we need to make. Then and only then would we get the green light to go on and do the larger health study.

We know from a lot of other previous studies that breathing the tiny little particles that are emitted by motor vehicles, especially diesel vehicles, are of concern. This is because those tiny particles get deep into our lungs, and they can even be absorbed into our bloodstream and cause health effects in various parts of our body.

Um, including over the long term, if you're exposed, you know, for many years to the development of cardiovascular disease of the kind that we see with cigarette smoking. Our goal is to have a phone app that kind of looks like a Google map that would optimize a route that minimizes exposure, you know, but also trading off against the time that it would take to follow that route. So that a person could choose some balance between saving time and saving air pollution exposure.

[Music] There's nothing else that I found that makes me as excited as I am to do this. You can't ride roller coasters that give you this feeling. You can't go other places and see anything like this. This is unique to here.