One mile on bike is a 42¢ economic gain to society, a mile driving is a 20¢ loss | Hacker News Reader

One mile on bike is a 42¢ economic gain to society, a mile driving is a 20¢ loss

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26 pointsvoxadam19 comments

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For a perfectly spherical person:

* The person's time is worth $0/hr

* The person is not disabled

* The person doesn't need to carry anything that can't fit in a backpack

* The weather is clemant enough

* The journey is short enough

The assumptions are always implicit.

Why would weather really be an issue? The city in the article has people cycling in the winter in the snow and also during the rain.

Realistically once you get fitter and fitter from riding the bicycle, your commute times will drop and if you’re in a city like the article, your trips aren’t even very far anyway. If anything driving is more annoying.

> The person's time is worth $0/hr

The time dedicated to getting physical activity is also worth 0$/hr (or even negative at a gym)

> The person is not disabled

What point are you actually trying to make here? That just because some can't bike that the argument is invalidated for the rest of society?

> The person doesn't need to carry anything that can't fit in a backpack

The person has never heard of baskets or cargo bikes

> The weather is clemant enough

The weather is blamed rather than the poor infrastructure

> The journey is short enough

Short enough for what? Also a repeat of the first point.

I mostly agree with all of this as somebody who did a lot of riding.

I used to be in much better shape, probably because I usually used a bike to get places.

I’m going to allow anybody disabled to get to where they need to be the easiest and safest way possible without any judgement.

I much prefer a rack on the back of the bike than a backpack. I’ve taken a 12 pack of Coca Cola bottles home on my bike plus my normal cargo. No problem.

I used to ride in -30C and snow. Fenders and a jacket will keep you pretty dry.

20km/hr is considered a normal pace. It was usually slower to take a bus and people still did that.

A “jacket” for -30C/-22F. Asking 99.9% of people to ride their bike in those temps is a complete non-starter.

99.9% of people never deal with that temperature on a daily or even monthly basis.

> For a perfectly spherical person

The transformation of humans to spherical shape is gluttony not evolution. They should be forced to ride a bike until their silhouette returns to that of a human.

> > For a perfectly spherical person

> The transformation of humans to spherical shape is gluttony not evolution. They should be forced to ride a bike until their silhouette returns to that of a human.

...GP's comment is a play on the "spherical cow" physics joke, and how models *will* have some unrealistic assumptions baked in, just so that the maths is easier to crunch through.

But this is from an annual report published by Copenhagen on the economic effect of bicycling on their city... so very much the opposite of what you're suggesting. Despite the possible adversities you've listed, there is the stated economic benefit, averaged across people.

If you don't fly you can pollute all you like. One plane trip is years of driving a car, per passenger. If you avoid buying items that came in on bulk cargo vessels, you can burn plastic and throw car batteries into the ocean with a completely clean conscience.

That person will get hit by the car and all their economic value will be lost.

That's an argument to reduce car usage and improve bike infrastructure

Not really because reducing car usage makes it worse. Less car congestion means higher potential and actual speed deltas. Increased likelihood of hitting a ped/bike rather than another car.

would be more holistic to compare and contrast to the individual (or personal) gain and loss.

you gain all kinds of health benefits from the exercise, and if enough people bike, you'll gain health benefits from lower pollution in your environment. That latter is more of a society thing though, which you don't seem to care about...

Any downsides?

No, that would be less holistic. It would be more fragmentary because you're looking at the specific rather than the general.

The sentence uses words like “gain”, which means it is stated relative to something else (driving). If we’re going to look at the group, why not also at the individual?

We don’t optimize everything for the group. Some things? Yes. All the things? No.

Yup sure, but that's still not what holistic means...

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