Daily walking/bicycling means longer, healthier life with half the health care costs

The following summary from a study by by John Pucher and John L. Renne (PDF) really took my breath away.

Will more walking and bicycling in your daily life increase your personal healthy life span dramatically while cutting your personal health care costs in half?

I don't know the answer to that question, but it sure seems to work on a societal level:

[B]oth rural and urban elderly in the United States miss out on the
daily physical exercise they would get from walking or cycling for some local trips.
While Americans 65 years of age or older make less than 10% of their trips by
walking or cycling, Germans and Dutch who are 75 years of age or older make
48%-55% of all their daily trips by either walking or cycling. That much higher
reliance on active transport modes in Europe probably contributes to average
healthy life expectancies (i.e. without major disabilities) that are 2.5 to 4.4 years
longer than in the United States, in spite of per-capita health expenditures that are
only half as high in Europe . . .