Walking consumes more gasoline than driving
ideas.4brad.com
ideas.4brad.com
People travel smaller distances in neighborhoods and cities designed around walking, biking, and mass transit (in the US, mostly pre-WWII neighborhoods) than in places designed around cars, because roads and parking lots require huge amounts of land, and high-speed automobile travel also enables people to live on larger plots of land. Don't let this kind of reasoning dissuade you from living in, and supporting the construction of, walkable neighborhoods.
That, combined with tax incentives for owning property, means I have finally given up my walkable neighborhoods and have embraced the carbon powered lifestyle. A few years ago I'd be the last person who would say that, I protested against highway expansion and pushed for bicycle infrastructure. Now I've given it all up, have moved out into the weeds, and pay the carbon lords prodigious amounts of cash.
If you want walkable, you have to give up nearly everything else and you better love spending all your time in that walkable little neighborhood. I couldn't do it, there's nowhere in a dirty city I want to be badly enough to give up everything else for.
I believe you mean 'higher' as in it's still a pretty low actual probability. Though, this is often a mis-perception from a more effective* media and more informed public versus a more classic spoken word of current events in smaller cities.
*a media based on fear mongering to encourage ratings and viewership.
Then there's the article last week that 40% of U.S. women don't feel safe walking their neighborhood streets at night.
I believe you mean 'higher' as in it's still a pretty low actual probability. Though, this is often a mis-perception from a more effective* media and more informed public versus a more classic spoken word of current events in smaller cities.
*a media based on fear mongering to encourage ratings and viewership.
Then there's the article last week that 40% of women don't fee
America has barely built any walkable neighborhoods since WWII, and in the post-WWII era we left most of the existing ones to rot. Now that such neighborhoods are desirable again, the ones that have survived as pleasant neighborhoods, especially in cities with strong economies, have become hideously expensive. (A lot are still pretty affordable in the Midwest.)
Your individual life choices are reasonable, but they're not an indictment of walkable neighborhoods in general so much as the last 60 years of American urban policy. Of course, suburbs have a broad spectrum, from pre-WWII railroad suburbs where downtown-bound commuters ride transit and kids walk to school, to the Sun Belt's utterly unwalkable sprawling hellscapes. The Milwaukee suburb I grew up in looks an awful lot like expensive central Portland neighborhoods, except it's a lot cheaper and transit is less well-used because downtown Milwaukee isn't doing all that well.
Whereas part of the reason why it's common for people to not own cars (or own fewer than one car per adult household member) in more walkable communities is that it's simply not practical - cars take up a lot of space that can't be used for other things, and making a community dense enough to permit easy walkability doesn't leave a lot of space left over the swaths of 200 square feet that it takes to temporarily store a car that isn't currently being driven. So the laws of supply and demand place those spaces at a premium.
In the long run, you can expect your net calorie balance to be zero - you'll lose or gain weight until your BMR equals your net calories. Based on that, and using [1], a 5'10", 25-year-old male weighing 150 pounds would have a BMR of ~1720. If they add 250 calories (approximately 1 snickers bar) per day, they would initially gain about 2 pounds per month and asymptotically approach their new, heavier weight (~190 pounds, >40 pounds more!). If instead they added 250 calories per day worth of exercise without compensating with more food, the opposite would happen, and they'd eventually lose 40 pounds.
It's not like you never see this sort of thing, but it seems to me like most people tend to maintain a pretty stable weight, which makes me think that on average we have some natural inertia when it comes to weight loss or gain.
Unless they were going to do comparable exercise anyway. Biking to work is unequivocally a win over driving to work and after an hour on a stationary bike.
This would be true if buses and light rail all ran on gasoline, but many don't. In Vancouver, the light rail system is entirely electric, as are about 1/3 of the buses.
Although maybe if you ate a diet of 100% beef and only walked along highways going 55mph walking would be less efficient...
The appropriate analysis is to look at the entire investment in the car-infrasctucture-industrial complex:
Roads
Gas Stations
Auto supply stores
Tool makers
Auto Companies
Auto Parts Suppliers
Shipping Industry that transports the cars
etc.
Trying to do it within a clear context is a good idea though.
That's not the point. The point is to be mindful of where the calories you're burning came from. And if you're in the developed world, with industrial agriculture, then your food is almost certainly steeped in petrochemicals.
So is automobile production. So the analysis is flawed.
Which is fine, but it's also false once corrected for capital intesity (and depreciation).
So the result is lame. It is not counter-intuitive or even...interesting. But YMMV.
The article is anyway more about considering the energy use of agriculture than it is about trying to win the comparison.
Does anyone have a reliable cite for this please? It feels a bit high. Does it include children and old people?
2800 is the high end of the scale. 2500 would be an average for males.
I am asking for a cite to support the statement "we eat on average 2700 calories per day".
That link has some self reported studies, and also explains the problems with those studies (very few people know how much they eat).
It also meantions that women eat less calories than men - about 2,000.