Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

Comment by IgorPartola | Hacker News Reader

No car is ever going to be as green as a bicycle. Forget cars. A motorcycle is probably the smallest powered vehicle that is street legal. Smallest one still will weigh at least 250lb. Moving just that mass alone, you’ve blown your energy budget vs a bicycle.

Oh I suppose you could argue about the environmental cost of producing the extra calories consumed by the cyclist. Growing and transporting that grass fed steak after all is going to require a whole lot of energy too. And not the clean kind. But you are still already operating at such a handicap, that there is no way a motorcycle, let alone a car, could compete.

On the other hand, unless the entire place is for bicycles only, what is the cost in human life for accidents caused by cycle-car interactions? Or the productivity cost for not showing up to work on rainy snowy days? I guess all you valley dwellers should probably cycle to work to save the planet for us all. We will applaud you from our AWD monstrosities here in the North East.

> Oh I suppose you could argue about the environmental cost of producing the extra calories consumed by the cyclist.

The human body is very efficient. I'd be extremely surprised if my 15 minute bicycle commute to work burned more than 100 calories on top of my BMR. There's just no comparison.

> I guess all you valley dwellers should probably cycle to work to save the planet for us all. We will applaud you from our AWD monstrosities here in the North East.

I'd link to icebike.org where they used to have pictures of people cycling in Chicago in winter and articles on suitable clothing and tires, but that domain got bought out and commercialized into some mountain bike advertising site.

ETA: Here you go: http://web.archive.org/web/19990221182354/http://www.enterac...

Cycling isn't that great. Humans are about 10% efficient at converting food energy to power. Plants are about 10% efficient at converting sunlight to food energy. So that's 1% efficiency from solar to pedals. Once you count the fossil fuels used in farming, which I forget the numbers for, I think a motorbike works out better for greenhouse gas emissions than cycling. Electric bike is probably the best.

That's assuming you don't reduce other workouts to make up for it. So riding your e-bike to the gym defeats the purpose.

> Plants are about 10% efficient at converting sunlight to food energy.

More like 0.25% to 0.5% into the edible parts of crop plants.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photosynthetic_efficiency

In addition- bicycling is incredibly energy efficient. According to the citation in this Wikipedia article it is The most effecient means of movement available! https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_performance

You could say bicycles and vim are my favorite tools.

> The human body is very efficient.

Uhh, you are not using the right metric.

Yes, humans take calories, and convert it to energy at a rate of 25%. But you aren't eating coal and turning it into energy.

The ways that humans turn sunlight into energy is that the sunlight hits plants, which gets harvested by humans, which gets fed to cows, and then get harvested, prepared, and transported to stores, and THEN it is consumed by humans.

I sincerely doubt humans are more efficient than cars, on a per energy basis.

This. Last estimate I saw said that you consume 10KW by just sitting there and breathing doing nothing. Because agriculture to feed you takes so much damn energy. Really we are talking about the difference in that roughly 10KW figure between a driver and a cyclist.

You are quite correct.

There are some mitigating circumstances though. The biggie is that all of this food is, in theory, carbon neutral; plants require CO2 to grow. While obviously this does not apply to the tractors, trucks, cargo ships etc in the rest of the preparation chain, that goes for fossil fuels as well - and chances are the fossil fuels have had to come farther and undergo even more processing. Nor are the emissions of the supply chain intrinsic to the fuel: we could theoretically replace all those tractors with electric ones powered by solar etc...

The other factor is that we can exert a great deal of personal agency over the emissions content of the food we eat. Cows, which you mention, are particularly bad because, although carbon-neutral, they effectively turn CO2 into methane which is a far more potent greenhouse gas. But we don't have to eat cows. Or food from the other side of the world. You can even grow your own food if you really want. So human-powering things reclaims personal responsibility.

Get them Conti Four Seasons baby baby

I used to work with someone in Boston who cycled to work every day no matter the weather. It was a real loss to her department when she was out for a year due to two broke wrists after an accident. I also had the mispleasure of seeing a cyclist hit by a train. I commend the people that do it at great personal bodily risk.

I used to work with someone in Philadelphia who drove to work every day no matter the weather. It was a real loss to his department when he was out for a year due to spinal damage after an accident. I also had the mispleasure of having a friend die in a car accident in high school. I commend the people that do it at great personal bodily risk.

#anecdataisnotdata

I absolutely agree. It's not. But my brain irrationally decided that having 2-3 tons of metal around me is safer than cycling on two aluminum tubes and round strips of rubber around 2-20 ton monstrosities that can and go 8-10 times faster than me. My brain isn't very good at this, on account of being human. So I won't cycle to work if I can help it, unless everyone else is too.

Just adding to your points:

> The human body is very efficient. I'd be extremely surprised if my 15 minute bicycle commute to work burned more than 100 calories on top of my BMR. There's just no comparison.

Also, biking is exercise, and we should all be getting some exercise daily. If bike commuting replaces some time you'd spend at the gym, the question of how much energy exercise consumes is irrelevant since you'll be using that energy either way. As others have mentioned, that can also save you the time of going to the gym in addition to the other benefits.

> I'd link to icebike.org where they used to have pictures of people cycling in Chicago in winter and articles on suitable clothing and tires, but that domain got bought out and commercialized into some mountain bike advertising site.

I live in Wisconsin and bike all winter. Some combination of fat tires, studded tires, and internal hub makes it easier. With my studded tires ice is basically a non-issue.

It's also easier to stay warm than you might expect. If you have any kind of jacket on your core can get hot really quickly while cycling. You do need decent clothing to protect your extremities.

In China, most people ride something like this: http://www.niu.com/ - small affordable (usually in $100-300 range) electric scooters that typically use 48V 20Ah batteries for a 70-80km distance. From the Niu stats, it seems like it uses about 1.1kWh/100km (in electricity), compared to a bicycle that uses about 3.1kWh/100km (in food energy, source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport...). If the electricity produced in a "clean" way, it seems that riding an electric scooter is quite green even compared to biking.

Of course, biking has a bunch of other advantages: sport and exercise, unlimited range, transportability, not mentioning mountain biking etc.

Forget cars. A motorcycle is probably the smallest powered vehicle that is street legal. Smallest one still will weigh at least 250lb. Moving just that mass alone, you’ve blown your energy budget vs a bicycle.

Electric bicycles are much lighter than 250 lb, and are definitely street legal.

But that’s a bicycle.

Let's call it a human assisted electric motorcycle then.

I am trying to make a distinction between fully powered vehicles and not.

You could also make a distinction between fully protected vehicles (two tons of steel around you in the form of a car) and not.

Human assisted electric motorcycles are fully powered when the human is not assisting them. You are of course right that popular ICE vehicles, cars and motorcycles, are much, much heavier than humans, and so have little hope to achieve similar efficiency to humans on bicycles. However, if your constraints is to go as fast as bicycles, and be as safe as bicycles, I don't understand why you wouldn't be able to be more green. Electric engines are very, very efficient at transforming electricity to mechanical power, and solar panels are more efficient at transforming solar power to electricity than the plants are at converting solar power to edible calories.

My whole point is that it is a choice between a safe fast method of transportation that works on virtually all weather, and an unsafe mostly seasonal slow method of transportation that is significantly greener. A powered bicycle that can go 15 mph is not in the same category as a motorcycle that can go 80 mph. Basically, if it can go on the freeway or not is the distinction I am making. Your electric assisted bicycle is just a better, less green bicycle.

It's an electric motorcycle. Fundamentally no different than this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_motorcycle#/med....

or these: https://www.google.com/search?q=board+track+motorcycle&tbm=i...

Yeah, no kidding. The way things are today in many parts of the US make cars the only viable option.

The real alternative to cars is better public transportation. Even cities with terrible weather can have great public transportation solutions. Cars are fine for rural areas, but no reason cities and suburbs shouldn't be re-engineered for bicycles and better public transport.

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