A classic graphic reveals nature's most efficient traveler
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
- https://www.zianet.com/wrucker/the%20energetic%20cost%20of%2...
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258884042...
The first article comes close, but is more about why bicycles are so energy efficient (due to of all things not stretching your muscles!)
Why have they animated the chart? It adds nothing, as far as I can tell.
Why all the tiny points? Is each one a data point (seems unlikely)?
Why is there only one swimmer?
Why is there a walker/runner area to the left and below swimmers? What is in that area?
Is this article just shilling for Big Velomobile? ;0)
Nothing on this chart surprises me, with the exception of salmon but that’s purely because I don’t really have any preconceptions about how efficient swimming is, beyond it feeling harder than walking in a human form.
Salmon is also a weird one to pick given their breeding method, you’d expect them to perhaps have some unusual adaptations as result of needing to swim hard upstream from time to time.
Also the fastest fish (sailfish) is similar to the fastest land animal (cheetah) at somewhere around 110kmh.
Trying to say that a dog is incredibly unefficient is misleading at best - especially when we're trying to make a statement about nature's most efficient traveller.
It's the classic physics issue - you are ignoring air resistance, but in this case you are ignoring everything other than a perfectly paved road.
Quite possibly. I would imagine it depends on the forest. I've been in forested areas on the mountain bike and you can cycle through these areas fine.
> It's the classic physics issue - you are ignoring air resistance, but in this case you are ignoring everything other than a perfectly paved road.
Rolling resistance is mainly down to the types of tyres used, how wide they are and how much they are inflated. Surface doesn't make that much of a difference IMO unless it is on a really lose surface e.g. loose gravel, mud or ice.
The biggest improvements to cycling efficiency is usually either being in a recumbent bicycle (less air resistance as you are led down) or by being in a more more Aero position with lycra on. But air resistance only becomes a big thing past 20mph or if you are wearing clothing that is really baggy.
Bicycles are the most efficient forms of transport in energy per mile. They are often the fastest in built up areas as well.
I don't disagree, but if this is the purpose of this graphic, why not just specifically measure different forms of transport in energy per mile?
This article is putting a metric of efficiency, while ignoring the reasons why things like a dog may have less efficent locomotion over perfectly flat terrain, because there are very few natural landmarks that have perfectly flat terrain.
I'd love to see a deeper comparison, how does efficiency of locomotion compare between animals within different types of environments, obstacles, etc. Otherwise this is a graphic that was used to make a point about cycling using an abstract measure rather than actual research.
> This article is putting a metric of efficiency, while ignoring the reasons why things like a dog may have less efficent locomotion over perfectly flat terrain, because there are very few natural landmarks that have perfectly flat terrain.
You can't control for this stuff and measure it really.
> I'd love to see a deeper comparison, how does efficiency of locomotion compare between animals within different types of environments, obstacles, etc.
Again this is difficult to control for. Other than particular areas where bicycle won't work (and there are very few places where that would apply), the bicycle is still likely to win out. Even if you have to get off occasionally to navigate over/under/around an obstacle you get all the benefits of efficiency for the majority of the time.
Can confirm, am 105kg 51-year-old and can get pretty close to 20mph on the flat on my elderly Commençal Uptown. I suspect someone that rode a greater distance per day and weighed about 20kg less would be able to hit 20mph for far longer periods of time.
The further point is that my even more elderly 30-year-old Range Rover can get something like 3mpg better fuel economy on a long run at 50mph than at 70mph. It's genuinely worth getting up at around 4am to drive on deserted roads at 40-50mph to get the back of the journey broken before you start to have to care about keeping up with traffic - just me and the lorries at that time - to get an easy 50-60 more miles out of a tank.
Bicycles are incredibly mechanically efficient because it's basically three sets of taper roller bearings and a chain drive, and chains are insanely efficient. Shaft drive and belt drive sound good, but belts have a lot of friction and shafts require a couple of right-angle gearboxes which are notoriously inefficent. You can make really efficient hypoid gears (that's what's in vehicle differentials, to turn the fore-and-aft propshaft's rotation through 90 degrees, and they're quiet, efficient, and immensely strong) but they require complex cutting curves.
I think that people complaining about the "inefficiency" of bikes are confusing efficiency with effectiveness. A bike would be very efficient at turning power from your legs into motion, but it would not be very effective at transporting two adults, 200kg of tools, and a 3.5 tonne trailer for a couple of hundred miles on road and then a few more up a steep muddy rocky mountain path.
The simple fact that bikes haven't really changed in about a century and a half should tell you how right they got it, straight out the gate. Everything else has been evolution. Take a look at the picture of the 1885 Rover Safety Bicycle on Wikipedia, and tell me you wouldn't quite happily daily that! Okay, you'd be a Hipster Fixie Twat but it would be just right for bimbling round the Finniestoun coffee shops with your ridiculous haircut and Macbook trying to find backers for your AI-powered Cat Food Over IP startup. Me, I'd throw a set of disc brakes and a 5-speed derailleur on, and ride it everywhere.
I genuinely like that frame, actually. I may have to invest in a tube bender.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safety_bicycle#/media/File:Rov...
Don't overthink it.
an average rat typically weighs less than 1 pound, while an average salmon weighs several pounds.
Do you live somewhere that game fish are particularly small, or rats are particularly large, or have you never been fishing?
The numbers I saw would be dramatically higher if sampling in freefall. Methodologies aim to average out those effects. It's easy enough to lie with disingenuous comparisons. It just doesn't make sense that something that needs to spin large rotors at supersonic speeds is more efficient than something that spins much smaller rotors.
How much energy is it going to take a human to cross 40000 km (circumnavigate the Earth)? A human on a jet will require around 2 tons of fuel and around 40 hours of time (fuel economy of about 4L per 100km of flight).
A human on a bicycle will roughly take about a year of travel (assuming a fairly reasonable 150km a day). In other words, about 1/50-th of a productive human life needlessly wasted that could have been used to improve the world.
Carbon footprint in the US is about 20 tons per year per person, so that's another way to look at a year of missed opportunity that you would spend by cycling instead of flying.
This aspect is almost completely ignored when people talk about bikes or public transit. Yes, they are efficient, but their efficiency comes at a cost of several wasted lifetimes of time every day for a large city.
If the chart is already a mish mash of numbers with someone's subjective opinions of the sort you mention then it's useless.
And the most efficient way overall? Working from home in suburbs that don't have transit.
If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person.
Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.
Nope. Cities are incredibly wasteful. For example, if we look at New York City, then a whole 1% of its population works directly as transit workers. And around 3% of the city in total are people just working on running the city.
This does not count the expense of capital projects. One mile of Manhattan subway now costs more than 1500 miles of a modern 6-lane freeway.
> You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal).
Even if you look at the most direct expenses, cities are not that advantaged. And the bigger the city, the more disadvantaged it becomes. The main reason is the complexity, capital projects for things like sewer replacements in cities cost literally hundreds if not thousands _times_ more than in rural areas.
It's actually much cheaper to dig extra ten miles of trenches than to pay to dozens of architects, inspectors, and planners to come up with a plan to open up a street in a city to replace a hundred meters of pipes.
Because almost anything you might build is more useful there than in the suburbs.
Or, you know, just appreciate this 2D chart for the two dimensions of factual information it is able to convey effectively.
That's it, that's the whole story. Adding calories for the "other stuff" that happens while travel is occurring is not part of the story.