Bikes are awesome. I would love to experience the joy of waking up in the morning and riding a bike to work. No traffic, healthy and all that good shit. I live, however, 40min away from my work by car and 3 hours by bike, one way. I dont see this changing in the foreseeable future so my idea of freedom has to be something different.
Nothing feels more like freedom than being stuck in a traffic jam.
Cop pulls you over on a bicycle:
“Drivers License and registration please”
“I don’t need those, I’m not driving this bicycle, I’m travelling on it officer. Private conveyance. I don’t contract with DMV.”
“Right you are sir, have a nice day!”
Why haven’t the sovcits cottoned on to this loophole?!
With the average commute to work in the US being 16 mi one way, The average speed of riding a bicycle in the city being 15 mph, that makes the average commute to work just over an hour long (over 2x the 27 minutes it takes in a car). If you work in a job that requires you to be presentable, then you need to add another 15 minutes to take a quick shower and change (if your workplace even has such facilities).
Obviously, this changes with e-bikes, but there’s not really a practical difference between most modern e-bikes and an electric moped.
Cars are the ultimate symbol of freedom because you just get in and go wherever to do whatever.
Pick nanna up? sure. Go buy her groceries? Sure. In the pouring rain? Ok. Pick up her dog from the vet? Yep. Drop by the garden store and grab 50kg of fertilizer? You bet.
You can do all of those things with out any planning or notice. You just get in and go wherever the day takes you.
I’m a bit bonkers about bikes. I have a cargo e-bike. It absolutely could do all of these things in separate trips. Doing all of them together would be a challenge but I am 100% here for that so long as nanna is. The main difference is planning. You need different gear, like a bike trailer for example. You’re also probably going to pick the right time of day, like early before it gets too hot or too windy, provided that it’s not raining.
Where are you all buying bike that don’t hurt your wallet to replace? I guess there are Walmart bikes but I’ve literally had a huffy fall apart while in motion.
My city has extreme height changes on almost every road – you’d have to be a seriously beefy rider to commute with a bike
car go further faster, and car more useful when not in big city.
Green Mario’s most loyal companion
Anyone who has ridden in rain and adverse weather would know one reason cars are more popular.
Not probably, a human riding a bicycle is the most efficient way to convert energy into movement. No other vehicle or animal can be as efficient.
Make no problem with bikes in Florida, when you arrive you are so drenched in sweat you are no longer presentable and stink to high heaven.
Biking to work if you have an office job is out of the question.
Biking to my gym or KungFu school… Perfect.
Just need the right tool for the right job.
I’m disabled in a way that means I can’t use one, but can use a car, which kinda sucks.
Fortunately bike infrastructure usually helps me in my chair, so I’m all in favor of wider bike adoption.
I don’t know your limitations, but you’d be surprised at the number of ways cycling can be made accessible.
For example, there are handbikes that attach to a wheelchair. As with all assistive tech it depends on your specific situation what is possible.
I’ve frequently seen a couple of people with recumbent hand bikes on one of the popular trails near me. They’re decently fast with the reduced air resistance, but road crossings are a bit of a hassle when you aren’t tall enough to be seen by an f450
Mount a flag to it. Quad bikes often add them so you can see them behind obstacles.
That blows. Glad the infrastructure helps your chair get around, though. Also, every biker not using a car gives you more space, so that’s an additional plus
Welcome to the Netherlands. If there’s anything that fills me with pride it’s our cycling culture. Most people have a car too, but I don’t, and I do everything by bike and public transport.
I cycled from Bruges to Amsterdam this summer and honestly it was an amazing holiday. Few days with headwind made us wish we had eBikes but the infrastructure was amazing. We basically could cycle on bike roads for 90%+ of the distance and felt very safe doing so. We loved especially Zealand landscape, food and small roads passing through the fields.
I think few countries would have made the holiday so pleasuring and chill, and obviously we encountered just so many people going on with their daily life even between cities with their bikes (I am assuming 20+ km rides). I have noticed that with ebikes also elder people had complete freedom to use bikes as they wished.
I really hope the dutch model is followed by more cities or countries.
Denmark checking in. Not unusual for people in the city not to have a car. I’m happy with my bike that I use every workday to cycle into the city centrum in all weather - I love dressing myself up in rain boots, rain paints and rain jacket and be on my way in heavy rain or snow, feeling like I’m in an episode of Deadliest Catch
I dream of immigrating there.
Someone can probably do the math, but i have a hunch that humans are technically not very fuel efficient if you look at calories burned pr the total mass being moved along.
But whatever it is biking is awesome, but being technically correct is even better.
something like 50-80 % of the energy we use (it depends on how active you are,) is used for just sustaining life (AKA your base metabolic rate.)
humans convert a bit less than 50% of the food-energy into a form we actually use- glucose. even though bicycles themselves are fairly efficient with the power put into them, humans themselves are not all that efficient. as for most effecient animals, that would probably be something like an albatross, which extracts energy from the wind to fly. (Specifically using a technique known as ridge lift. in the R/C world, the speed record is 548mph or so- set by a glider using similar techniques, and albatrosses can cross entire oceans.)
You couldn’t be more wrong. Bicycle is the most efficient way of moving.
If you account manufacturing energy, then in a short time it is overcome by walking.
Interesting. It just feels so counterintuitive, but as I wrote, it was just a hunch and apparently many telle me now its not so. Do you have any numbers or sources to back up the claim that I can use for future fun facts sessions to annoy my family?
Humans are actually unusually energy efficient for mammals when walking and even more so when cycling. Here’s a little info graphic showing a breakdown.
One thing to keep in mind if you have a dog is they’re less energy efficient than humans. While dogs can run faster, a reasonably fit human can easily out distance an equally fit dog when walking or distance running.
Also, I love the units. Using miles on one axis and km on the other.
This is very useful. My four friends and I will have to stop swimming to work, and take the car instead.
Nice graphic.
But it seems like it doesn’t factor in kg of mass moved. A human and a bike is a lot lighter than a car or a horse. You could also argue that the vehicle weigh should be ignored but then again you could easily argue back that weight of goods move can possibly be a lot higher with a car if you load it up to capacity. Ignore that. I did not see it said 5 riders for the carI’m back with better data. I’m assuming the travel path is perfectly flat because I don’t feel like modeling elevation changes. I’m being energy efficient (read: lazy).
For cycling, I’m using the global average human weight of 62 kg, assuming the cycle is 8 kg, and the pace is 10 kph, which is pretty relaxed.
For walking, I’m using the 62 kg person walking at 4 kph.
For driving with petrol, we’ll use the same spherical 62 kg human and a 2024 Toyota Prius with a fuel efficiency of 4.8 L/100 km and a mass of 1570 kg. One liter of petrol is approximately 8174 kcal. Double the energy expenditure for an estimate for your typical SUV.
For electric, I chose a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N with an energy efficiency of 21.2 kWh/100km and a mass of 2235 kg. One kilowatt-hour is approximately 860 kcal.
Walking: 0.74 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Cycling: 0.34 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Driving(p): 0.24 kcal•km-1•kg-1
Driving(e): 0.08 kcal•km-1•kg-1Oh really. It seems to contradict the graphics. Cars are also stupid efficient now. I also ran some quick calculations on my electric bike and it is crazy how many km*kWh⁻¹ you get and how little it cost to run.
I’ve heard about some research showing that an electric bike over it’s entire lifetime is more environmentally friendly than a traditional one because the amount of extra food you need to consume without the electric help is over time more co2 than the co2 it costs to charge the battery. I don’t know where the research is from since I just heard it from a colleague so don’t quote me on it, but electric motors are really efficient so it sounds very plausible to me.
Electric bikes are super efficient, I’m a big fan.
While the petrol and electric vehicles are surprisingly efficient moving a given unit of weight, that also includes their own weight, constantly, making their overall energy use…not great.
Wait so cars are more efficient than cycling now ?
Yes and no. They take less energy to move a given unit of weight around, but they’re massively heavy so they expend tons of energy moving themselves the entire time.
Seems so. Even cheating it in favor of the bikes. But looking at electric car numbers it should make ebikes even more effecient.
It still doesn’t give us kcal•km-1•kg-1 (or an equivalent), which is what I was looking for. We could do some math to get us some loose estimates, though. I’ll do exactly that and report back shortly.
I feel like ‘total mass being moved’ is irrelevent if most of that mass is useless (car motor/metal frame/plastic/etc).
Even if a car motor was more efficient per kg, most of the work is wasted on moving the actual car itself, regardless of the passengers & cargo.
Bikes clearly use less energy to displace ‘useful mass’ than a car, so they are more efficient in that sense.
Quick math shows I am quite a bit more efficient than a Nissan Juke traveling 150 miles at 19mph. About 50kcal/pound for the car and 8kcal/pound for me+bike to travel the distance.
