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Comment by npsimons | Hacker News Reader

> 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...

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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 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

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

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.

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