This is a place to share greentexts and witness the confounding life of Anon. If you're new to the Greentext community, think of it as a sort of zoo with Anon as the main attraction.
Be warned:
If you find yourself getting angry (or god forbid, agreeing) with something Anon has said, you might be doing it wrong.
Make no problem with bikes in Florida, when you arrive you are so drenched in sweat you are no longer presentable and stink to high heaven.
Biking to work if you have an office job is out of the question.
Biking to my gym or KungFu school.... Perfect.
Just need the right tool for the right job.
Anyone who has ridden in rain and adverse weather would know one reason cars are more popular.
Picking up a week's worth of shopping for a family, whilst taking your baby with you, in the pouring rain, and you live up a steep hill, and you have joint pain, and a sudden work meeting across the other side of town in an hour...
I'd love a city designed round bicycles (Cambridge, UK is quite good like that in the centre) but man, despite the downsides cars are amazing things.
car go further faster, and car more useful when not in big city.
For this, bike friendly cities have good public transport (bus/tram/metro) and bike shares
$20 gas gets me much, much, much further than $20 in eating high carb prepared food when riding my bike between point A and B. Not fuel efficient, in fact, energy expensive, but it is over all cheaper than a car if you can handle the potential physical abuse of riding a quarter mile up hill to your house. I did this last year while my car was in the shop, I learned I lived at the top of a hill, in the middle of a valley. Lost around 14lbs in a week just running errands, and I was carb loading like crazy. Carbs, meat, sugars, and tons of water. Riding a bike is all laughs and giggles until you're doing it to get meat and milk to fuel your required errands and despite eating everything in sight you're still losing weight at a shocking pace... They had my car a month, I was able to hold out on most errands until around just before the final week, went from 179, to 165. Kept eating as I felt I needed and was back up to 175 in about a week after getting my car back, and with recent exercise and pushing myself I dropped to 169 while increasing my max weight, it's really only surprising when you find I was 280ish lbs just 6 yrs ago... I digress, bikes are tough on the body.
Not probably, a human riding a bicycle is the most efficient way to convert energy into movement. No other vehicle or animal can be as efficient.
Thats why I have a bike-sled team to pull my horribly inefficient sled across the asphalt
Because people with disabilities and chronic illness exist, and because depending on the distance it’s not possible to go by bike and depending on the terrain it’s also no possible. Oh and the weather I forgot the weather… oh and in some roads, like highways, for example, these can’t even drive there:..
Bikes aren't the perfect transportation method for everyone all the time but they are a good option for most people most of the time. Also, I have a chronic illness and I ride year round in a place that regularly hits -40
Someone can probably do the math, but i have a hunch that humans are technically not very fuel efficient if you look at calories burned pr the total mass being moved along.
But whatever it is biking is awesome, but being technically correct is even better.
Humans are actually unusually energy efficient for mammals when walking and even more so when cycling. Here's a little info graphic showing a breakdown.
One thing to keep in mind if you have a dog is they're less energy efficient than humans. While dogs can run faster, a reasonably fit human can easily out distance an equally fit dog when walking or distance running.
Also, I love the units. Using miles on one axis and km on the other.
This is very useful. My four friends and I will have to stop swimming to work, and take the car instead.
Nice graphic. ~~But it seems like it doesn't factor in kg of mass moved. A human and a bike is a lot lighter than a car or a horse. You could also argue that the vehicle weigh should be ignored but then again you could easily argue back that weight of goods move can possibly be a lot higher with a car if you load it up to capacity~~. Ignore that. I did not see it said 5 riders for the car
I'm back with better data. I'm assuming the travel path is perfectly flat because I don't feel like modeling elevation changes. I'm being energy efficient (read: lazy).
For cycling, I'm using the global average human weight of 62 kg, assuming the cycle is 8 kg, and the pace is 10 kph, which is pretty relaxed.
For walking, I'm using the 62 kg person walking at 4 kph.
For driving with petrol, we'll use the same spherical 62 kg human and a 2024 Toyota Prius with a fuel efficiency of 4.8 L/100 km and a mass of 1570 kg. One liter of petrol is approximately 8174 kcal. Double the energy expenditure for an estimate for your typical SUV.
For electric, I chose a 2024 Hyundai Ioniq 5 N with an energy efficiency of 21.2 kWh/100km and a mass of 2235 kg. One kilowatt-hour is approximately 860 kcal.
Walking: 0.74 kcal•km^-1^•kg^-1^
Cycling: 0.34 kcal•km^-1^•kg^-1^
Driving(p): 0.24 kcal•km^-1^•kg^-1^
Driving(e): 0.08 kcal•km^-1^•kg^-1^
It still doesn't give us kcal•km^-1^•kg^-1^ (or an equivalent), which is what I was looking for. We could do some math to get us some loose estimates, though. I'll do exactly that and report back shortly.
I feel like 'total mass being moved' is irrelevent if most of that mass is useless (car motor/metal frame/plastic/etc).
Even if a car motor was more efficient per kg, most of the work is wasted on moving the actual car itself, regardless of the passengers & cargo.
Bikes clearly use less energy to displace 'useful mass' than a car, so they are more efficient in that sense.
Quick math shows I am quite a bit more efficient than a Nissan Juke traveling 150 miles at 19mph. About 50kcal/pound for the car and 8kcal/pound for me+bike to travel the distance.
I'm disabled in a way that means I can't use one, but can use a car, which kinda sucks.
Fortunately bike infrastructure usually helps me in my chair, so I'm all in favor of wider bike adoption.
I don’t know your limitations, but you’d be surprised at the number of ways cycling can be made accessible.
For example, there are handbikes that attach to a wheelchair. As with all assistive tech it depends on your specific situation what is possible.
I've frequently seen a couple of people with recumbent hand bikes on one of the popular trails near me. They're decently fast with the reduced air resistance, but road crossings are a bit of a hassle when you aren't tall enough to be seen by an f450
Welcome to the Netherlands. If there's anything that fills me with pride it's our cycling culture. Most people have a car too, but I don't, and I do everything by bike and public transport.
Denmark checking in. Not unusual for people in the city not to have a car. I’m happy with my bike that I use every workday to cycle into the city centrum in all weather - I love dressing myself up in rain boots, rain paints and rain jacket and be on my way in heavy rain or snow, feeling like I’m in an episode of Deadliest Catch
Arrive to work soaked in sweat because it's been 100+ degrees every day for the past 8 weeks.
You lose the benefits of it being cheap, but an ebike is a decent solution
Well, that is largely caused by cars.