Bicycles don't just save petroleum, although they are 42 times more efficient than the automobile (and I should know, I've saved some US$600 in petrol this summer alone by riding over 3000 miles on my road and tandem bikes in Madison, Wisconsin, to say nothing about the capital costs of the auto which bring the cost of operating an auto conservatively to 57 cents (US) per mile (I've seen figures as high as 97 cents, for just my summer riding) giving me actual savings of about about 1,300 dollars when I've deducted the cost of bike maintenance,). This doesn't include externalized costs such as roads, pollution, and damage to the environment and disruption of communities. Bikes also play a major role in public health by reducing obesity and related diseases such diabetes, both of which are becoming epidemic.

The car also doesn't really save time, which would be the major claim in its favor. The sum total time over the life-time of the car that you spend working to pay for the car, of sitting in it and looking for parking is actually more than if you had ridden a bike everyplace, again under ideal conditions which don't exist in Nepal. I have always felt that people are paying a kind of feudal due for the car of a couple days a week of labor to the landlord, in this case financial capital that underwrites automobile manufacture and oil production. Much of the debt of countries of North America and Europe is due to vast amounts of wealth exported to pay for energy for auto transport. Even China's balance of trade became unfavorable for the first time several years ago due to import of petroleum. The situation must be even worse for Nepal, and furthermore it is a cost that generally is being transferred from the urban elites to Nepal's rural population, the major productive sector of the country. 

The bicycle besides saving petroleum, time, and national wealth contributes to public health. A study that came out last week from the CDC in the United States said that people should be riding a bike an average of an hour a day to cut into the obesity epidemic that now has become epidemic in the United States and the world. The human body requires work to be healthy, and a study of Pacific islanders has shown that the introduction of the automobile is associated with obesity and obesity-related diseases such as diabetes and high blood pressure. The increasing car per person ratio in the United States has a close relation to obesity and related diseases. In my own experience I have found that the few times in my life that I have used an automobile I feel weight start to accumulate on my body, and when I bike again it disappears. This is particularly true among South Asians, about whom a report from the British national health service this week has shown to be so prone to diabetes that the body-mass index should be set lower for South Asian than for European populations.

The irony is that instead of getting out and walking or riding, people go to the doctor to get medications, which in addition to their inconvenience add significantly to the cost of the car. I might add that because diabetes alone shortens human life by an average of 15 years, the bicyclist can be given at least an extra 15 years of surplus time saved. 

Regarding car accidents, you have ten times the chance of being killed in a car than on a bicycle. If any other form of transport killed, disabled and injured a fraction of the number of people as the auto, it would be shut down immediately to find out what is wrong. One reason that it is not done so is because incidents with the car are framed as as individual rather than social costs, even though ultimately they are transferred as a whole to society. Furthermore the accidents generate market value in repair and replacement costs of the car, medical and funeral costs, and so forth, so in a twisted sort of way the stock markets become richer even as the society becomes poorer, encouraging the tragedy and waste of the auto.

Flaws to DG's comments: Besides the fact that none of that will happen, (1) increased roads lead to greater congestion because you get even more blockage in other locations that aren't built up,which in turn back up into "improved" areas, (2) the more infrastructure you build, the more maintenance cost of the infrastructure is incurred. Currently, in the United States, for example, with growing debt the country's infrastructure is beginning to crumble. (3) If you know anything about the words "peak oil," you will know that there is no future in a transport system based on the use of petroleum, particularly for small countries trying to bid against large ones, and that not just boys will be committing suicide but the whole society will do so when this road is taken. 

Why not put social wealth into something with a future and save your cities, land and social space? There are alternatives which are much more comfortable and enjoyable, much faster, and have much less impact on the environment. Take as example cities such as Amsterdam, which have designed themselves around the bicycle and sane forms of public transport, and thereby saved their unique and livable character? Even in my current city Madison, Wisconsin, which has four months of snow, there are more bike trails, paths and lanes than all the auto roads in the much larger Kathmandu Valley and more bicycles than automobiles. And not only that, you can take bike trails across country for hundreds of miles in all four directions. It is all there because people have organized and fought for it. We also sell more bike related products from our state than all the other 49 states of the United States put together.