Lawmaker says biking bad for the environment | Hacker News Reader

Lawmaker says biking bad for the environment

seattlebikeblog.com

30 pointsmakeshifthoop55 comments

A gallon of gas has 30,000 Calories. An SUV weighs (technically masses) 2000kg and gets 20 MPG. Thus the kilogram miles per Calorie -- the efficiency -- for an SUV is 1.33.

A peanut butter sandwich is 600 Calories (with bananas and maple syrup on whole wheat, but corn syrup on Wonder bread is similar). A bicycle plus messenger bag and rider weighs 80kg and gets 10 miles to the peanut butter sandwich. Thus the efficiency of the bicycle is 1.33 kg.mi/C.

So far the bicycle and SUV seem exactly equal in efficiency and have equal environmental impact.

But that doesn't take into account cost. The peanut butter sandwich costs $5, or $3 if you make it at home. Call it $4. The gallon of gasoline also costs $4. But the gasoline has 50x the energy. The total cost to society is 50x higher to operate the bicycle, taking all process costs into account through the price system.

So in fact, biking is terrible for the environment. We'd all be better off banning bicycles and buying every cyclist an SUV and then having a mass lycra bonfire. Plus, think of all the cash we would save by not blowing it on extra bicycle fuel. It could save the economy.

Isn't 1 food calorie equal to 1000 physics calories?

Yes. Food calories are actually kilocalories.

1 Calorie = 1000 calories. Yes, the unit is differentiated by capitalization.

And for the sake of preventing further confusion, it's probably best to promptly convert that into a sensible unit: 1 Calorie = 4184 Joules.

10 miles seems pretty low to me. I can easily get double that giving it 2.66 kg.mi/C

> But the gasoline has 50x the energy. The total cost to society is 50x higher to operate the bicycle

I know your comment was tongue-in-cheek, but energy content =/= cost to society.

The health benefits alone of cycling make it a net win given current costs.

Medicare kicks in and absorbs all medical costs at social expense beginning at age 65. Cyclists seldom die before 65, so that is a social cost.

Cycling has known cardiovascular side effects. As a result cyclists seldom die suddenly of heart disease, the cheapest of the common ways to die. Another social cost.

Everybody dies of something but cyclists are proven to live much longer and consume extensive social resources in their lingering. Triple social cost.

The ideal health policy for our nation's fiscal health is to tax cyclists and use the cash to buy cigarettes for young people.

You forgot to include the economic cost to production that occurs when a bicycle courier ends up beneath an SUV. This delays delivery from the SUV, unnecessarily uses up emergency services, and moves delivery onto other, inefficient bicycle couriers who have to take up the slack while the original spends 6 months in hopstial.

My peanut butter and banana sandwich costs less than 75 cents, and I buy the fancy bread and peanut butter.

Increasing efficiency... And fuel prices keep going up. And if we stop subsidizing they will double or tripple.

Is this meant to be ironic or am I totally missing something? Sure the kilogram miles per Calorie look similar, but as you noticed the SUV is a lot heavier than the bicycle. You should only include the weight of the payload, i.e. the passenger, in the calculation because that's what you want to move. Having to move an additional 2000kg of SUV around is what makes SUV-driving so inefficient.

>Is this meant to be ironic or am I totally missing something?

I think if you note the claim that a homemade PB&J sandwich costs $3, as well as the reference to "extra bicycle fuel", you will have your answer.

You are correct, if you are talking only about pure efficiency. Your parent was talking about (ironically or not) cost. At current market rates, peanut butter is inarguably a more expensive fuel per Calorie than gasoline.

Not to mention that a bike's wear and tear on the road is exponentially less than the damage incurred by a passenger car or SUV: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gross_axle_weight_rating

> A bicycle plus messenger bag and rider weighs 80kg

wait, what?

You forgot to consider the production process of the SUV versus the bike.

Except that you have to assume the person driving the SUV eats too.

He's only including the extra calories, not the baseline.

Remember when we say food Calories, we actually mean kilocals. HOWEVER, while fuel itself may be more efficient to move, you always end up moving a very heavy item (the car) thus you always do better by not moving the car. AND that person inside it as well.

However, we also must account in addition to fuel cost, the cost of the person breathing. A person's standard breathing vs ~ double for exercising. So a person sitting inside that SUV is already creating ~ half the CO2 that a biker would.

Then the final note: Gasoline is a very finite supply. PB&J for all practical purposes is 100% renewable.

Interestingly, a 2004 life-cycle analysis of energy costs came to the conclusion that electric bicycles were more efficient than human-powered (given average diet).

http://www.ebikes.ca/sustainability/Ebike_Energy.pdf

This demented viewpoint overlooks how much more efficient bicycling is than virtually any other mode of transport.

Link: http://www.exploratorium.edu/cycling/humanpower1.html

Quote: "The bicycle is a tremendously efficient means of transportation. In fact cycling is more efficient than any other method of travel--including walking!"

The hidden agenda is that such an efficient mode of transport is difficult to tax based on conventional measures like fuel used or CO2 emitted -- although it's apparent that people will try.

I think bicyclists should be taxed based on what their existence costs society as a whole -- freeway construction, pothole repair, global warming, health care for those dying of heart disease and diabetes. By that reasoning, bicyclists should receive a tax credit, like those who install solar panels or buy electric cars.

Oh -- did I mention that I'm a bicyclist?

How do you like rain and snow?

I like it better than my bikes do, which tend to dissolve over time (I live near Seattle).

He apologized and recanted:

http://www.seattlebikeblog.com/2013/03/04/rep-orcutt-says-bi...

ah thanks for posting the reply.

Indeed, he goes on to say that he supports a bicycle tax only so far as it goes towards actually helping expand bicycle infrastructure, and that he made this suggestions after it was brought to him by the bicycling community.

This seems like much ado about nothing.

There already is a bicycle tax, it's called sales tax.

But that tax is not specific to bikes only. People who buy cars also pay sales taxes. But they pay other taxes in addition to the initial sales tax. They also pay fuel taxes, which is an indirect tax.

Not that I'm against those taxes. I would wish we'd tax fuel more (and in the future, the source of energy for transportation when cars start using more alternate energy sources) as a way to incentivize people toward more shared resources. But I'm not for trying to paint equivalence on the tax front. At the same time, I think this needs to be phased in. I think about the people in rural areas who need cars to get to civilization --keeping in mind the story of an acquaintance who said would sell pints of blood to buy fuel to get to and from work when money was low --ie getting to work before the next paycheck provided more money.)

That's a great hypothetical, but it falls flat in reality. The cost differential between bicycle infrastructure and car infrastructure is orders of magnitude.

Indeed. And property taxes. And spending from general funds. Etc, etc.

40% of spending on roads comes from funds completely unrelated to gas or vehicle taxes. This amounts to about $180 per person per year in funds unrelated to taxing automobiles or gas. [1]

To contrast this, per capita spending on cycling infrastructure, while significantly improved in recent years, peaked at $3.95 per person per year. [2]

Quite simply, looking at the actual numbers, it is hard to support the argument that cyclists are being subsidized by drivers.

[1] http://www.transalt.org/files/newsroom/magazine/032Spring/02...

[2] http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/the-bicycle-div...

I remember reading (but don't have the link handy) about a gentlemen who did lots of analysis about his switch from car commuting to bike commuting. His conclusion was that bike commuting is more expensive for him, because he ends up eating more to compensate for the calories burnt during the ride. The cost of additional food was higher than the cost of gas saved (as someone below already pointed out that food energy is more pricey than gas energy).

The guy with the data analysis nevertheless decided to stick with the bike because he suspected that this decision will have positive long term health effects saving him a lot of money in future. I am inclined to agree but in my case the parking fees at work make the decision a no-brainer anyway.

I bike a lot and I don't notice that I really eat more on days when I bike. And if I do it just means that I eat a slightly bigger portion of whatever I was eating anyway so the cost difference is negligible.

Also the price of gas is relatively fixed whereas with food you can economize by eating ramen instead of steak.

Bicycling is surprisingly expensive once you don't want to lose weight. At 200 calories per dollar (i.e. about $10 per day for a sedentary diet) and four dollars per gallon of gas it comes out to the equivalent of 25 mpg. There's obviously a whole bunch of other relevant factors, but personally it hadn't even occurred to me that food would be my primary bicycle-related expense until I started riding a lot.

It's a lot more pleasant to eat a meal than it is to pump gas into your car.

Indeed. Go ahead and get the BIG slice of chocolate cake.

Brown rice is about 8 cents per 200 calories.

I bike 15,000+ km per annum and my premium ice cream and imported chocolate budgets alone would easily make several car payments.

200 Cal/$? Maybe if you are eating out a lot, or you eat a lot of cheese and meat? My food comes in closer to 500-1000 Cal/$, depending on how hard I'm trying.

Reasonably good Cheddar is $10/kg ~ 400kc/$, and butter ~ 1000 kc/$.

I find that very hard to believe. When I bike, I really don't eat that much more than when I don't. Yeah, my appetite increases a little, but I can usually supplement my diet with some pretty cheap calories, or a lot of time just finishing more of what's put in front of me. American portions are fairly large, I usually have a calorie surplus.

And even when I do buy more, a few dollars a day isn't all that much. Now, gas for my commute also wouldn't cost much; at 10 miles a day, that's less than $2 a day. But gas isn't the only cost of owning a car. There's the price of the car itself, and depreciation, maintenance, insurance, taxes, parking. Heck, at my last job, it would have cost $200 a month just for parking alone. My bike has maybe had $1000 put into it for original cost, accessories, maintenance over the past 5 years I've had it, and I've had to put none of those other costs in.

You'd have to bike at a resting heartrate to come anywhere close to not needing any more food.

That's assuming you don't normally eat more calories than you need. Probably an incorrect assumption for most people.

Lawmaker apologizes for bashing bicycles and all their pollution

http://now.msn.com/ed-orcutt-washington-rep-apologizes-for-b...

I don't know whether I should laugh or cry...

Please elect more people with a clue. More politicians with a background in science or engineering would be a good thing.

This guy's just another falling brick from the edifice that was once the Republican Party.

> Please elect more people with a clue.

Americans famously don't trust smart people. American anti-intellectualism is no more obvious than at the voting booth.

The last truly smart person to run for president was Adlai Stevenson (in 1952 and 1956). Even though women liked him and voted for him, he really didn't have a chance.

Based on how we vote, and for whom, we have the representatives we deserve.

Somehow I was able to guess he was a Republican before I read the article, imagine that!

Not going to defend his monumental stupidity to make such a statement, but if you're thinking that Republicans have any kind of lock on monumental stupidity, I beg to differ: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zNZczIgVXjg

I don't buy the lawmaker's 'fairness' argument either. True, cyclists do use streets but so do automobile passengers yet no one is floating the idea of applying a tax to them.

Many revenue sources have this quality. Property taxes foot the bill for schools in many municipalities. And 'sin taxes' definitely don't benefit the people who pay them the most.

The Rep. is spouting ungrounded rhetoric. Surprise, surprise.

Actually, a large part of the cost of gasoline in most U.S. States is a gasoline tax that goes to their respective Departments of Transportation.

That said, this is still ridiculous.

And mostly that goes to the state highways that cyclists generally can't use, while the county and city streets that cyclists do use are mostly funded by local property and sales taxes.

Politicians don't do science well, and they don't listen to people who do. The prognosis is bad.

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