In “Bike for Life: How to Ride to 100″ (Avalon Press, $16.95), authors Roy Wallack and Bill Katovsky lay out a premise that says cycling — with its combination of fun, ease, travel, social interaction, joint-gentleness and physical challenge — is the ideal sport for longevity.

As Wallack puts it, cycling is a panacea that can help you “roll into the triple digits –miles and age — on a bike instead of in a wheelchair.”

The book, a manual of sorts organized in digestible articles, sidebars and lists, offers how-to exercises and riding advice. (Wallack writes on health for the Los Angeles Times; Katovsky founded Triathlete magazine.)

On the longevity front, there’s an “antiaging strength plan” to revive reaction time, methods for avoiding back cramping and injury while riding, and advice on cycling and its effects on osteoporosis.

Bonus: The book includes interviews with aging stars of the sport such as Mike Sinyard, founder of Specialized Bikes, mountain-bike pioneer Gary Fisher and adventure cyclist John Howard, who might just be proving the authors’ premise to be true.

How bikeable is your community? The bikeability checklist made available by bicyclinginfo, can help you find the answer. Inside you’ll find insightful questions, allowing you to evaluate your neighborhood’s bikeability. In addition to the questions, the Checklist provides both immediate answers and long-term solutions to your neighborhood’s potential problems.

Pick a place to ride a bike, like the route to school or a friend’s house. As you ride, use the checklist to describe problem areas and things to change. After the ride, answer all of the questions and you’ll see how your route rates on the bikeability scale. Take heart if you find problems, there are many ways you can make things better.

Or you can fill-out an online version of this checklist at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation website. Click on the link below, and then click on ‘How bikeable is your community?’ in the bottom-right corner.

More bikes = more happy.

Todd Litman of the Victoria Transportation Policy Institute (VTPI) an independent research organization dedicated to developing innovative and practical solutions to transportation problems, released a study yesterday that compares people’s satisfaction with their daily commutes.

Litman found that people with short, human-powered commutes were happier than their transit or motor vehicle-using counterparts.

Litman’s chart shows the likes and dislikes of various commuting methods.

His findings were released in a 37-page report titled, Valuing Transit Service Quality Improvements: Considering Comfort and Convenience In Transport Project Evaluation .(view PDF here)

Litman found that length of commutes was a key indicator of satisfaction (shorter commutes = happier people) and that the traditional practice of increasing highway capacity to speed them up is not a cost effective solution. From the study,

Conventional analysis favors highway expansion to increase traffic speeds, while more comprehensive analysis favors alternative modes to improve comfort and convenience.

Here’s an analysis of the report from Clark Williams-Derry of the Sightline Institute:

The happiest of all commuters get to work under their own power. Bikers express the highest levels of satisfaction, and least dissatisfaction, with their morning and afternoon treks. Walkers are close behind. I’m not sure if that’s because walkers and bikers tend to have shorter commutes, or because they tend to have pleasant or stress-free routes (otherwise, they’d choose another way to get to work). Either way, it seems like a good way to make people happier with their commute is, if possible, to give them a safe and quick way to get to work under their own power.

So the answer is simple. Build safer and more efficient bikeways and we’ll have a city full of happy people.