Comment by frankus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by frankus | Hacker News Reader

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There is actually a bit more to this line of argument than the idiotic one the lawmaker takes.

The primary thing that makes a bicycle more efficient than a car is that it weighs around an order of magnitude less than the passenger, rather than the other way around. The second most important factor is that it travels at (and is optimized to travel at) relatively low speeds.

The fact that it's powered, essentially, by food calories is actually one of its least efficient aspects (raw food vegan locavores potentially excepted).

The cool thing is that means you can power a small electric vehicle essentially for free (both financially and environmentally). So people who are unwilling or unable to work up a sweat on the way to work can still take part in most of the benefits of cycling.

In terms of environmental cost (not just CO2) a bicycle is actually 3 times as expensive as a really good car: http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/2011/09/is-a-bicycle-really...

And if you put 4 people in that car, it wins easily, even with a somewhat more average car.

People like bikes mainly because people eat and exercise anyway, so they might as well do some useful work for it. But purely from the environment, and assuming people only bicycle for need, not exercise, it's not an automatic win.

This article's argument is, in a word, crap. The author wants to compare efficiency of cars vs. bikes on the basis of fuel costs (after a scattershot discussion of CO2 emissions from those aerobically respirating vs a bus spitting out fumes), then cites fast food as a baseline fuel source. We can game this anyway we want: why not eat 7 bananas, which are $0.20 at my local market, and claim differently? And let's conveniently forget that EVERYONE needs food, regardless of how they expend or conserve their caloric "fuel". I'd like to see a more scientific analysis of carbo emissions of bicyclists vs cars vs public busses. I strongly suspect bikes come up with high marks in the average case.

Go ahead - use bananas, the math is easy.

It's obvious that a cyclist will use more calories than someone not moving. The calculations are done using only the extra calories, not the baseline.

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