A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
Cyclist burn more calories
So does jogging, swimming, dancing, and...sex? Anything that isn't sedentary lifestyle gonna burn more calories. But OOP doesn't need to worry about any of those.
NO WAY!!!! We better cancel all sports!!!!!!1!1!11!1one
No more sex!
Mike Pence rubbing his hands together
This has to be satirical
Absolutely. It’s quite funny.
Or at least a dig at someone being overly pious. My brother for a while was unbearable about his 2 x EVs saving the world while living in a city with at least 6 public transport alternatives within 100m
he's right, we all know that exploring, extracting, refining, distilling, and distributing petroleum and its derivatives doesn't cost anything
Alright, I'll take the bait. Let's do some recreational math
This web page contains average passenger car fuel efficiency broken down by year. The most recent year available is 2016, so we'll use that: 9.4 km/L or 22.1 miles per gallon. A gallon of gas has about 120MJ of energy in it. So, an average car requires about 120,000,000 / (1/22.1) = 5.4MJ per mile
This web page has calories burned for different types of exercise. I separately searched and found that the average adult in the US weighs around 200LBS, so we'll use the 205LBS data, and I'm going to assume that "cycling - 10-11.9 MPH" is representative of the average commuter who isn't in too much of a hurry. That gives us 558 calories per hour, or 55.8 calories per mile (using the low end of the 10 to 11.9mph range). That's equal to about 0.23MJ per mile (as an aside, it's important to note that the calories commonly used when talking about diet and exercise, are actual kilocalories equal to 1000 of the SI calories you learned about in school.)
Moral of the story: an average bike ride consumes around 20x less energy than an average drive of the same distance.
We also gotta keep in mind that cycling makes people healthier, so it has that benefit, and that it can also potentially replace some exercise people would be doing otherwise, in which case you're basically moving for free since you would have expanded those calories anyways.
You mean I don't have to drive to the gym anymore if I cycle to work?
Worth noting that cars can fit more people in them than bikes can.
So with that in mind, clearly the true moral of the story is that clown cars are the most efficient method of travel.
That's cute. No other personal vehicle beats the caloric efficiency of a bicycle, and it's not even close. They're very literally one of the most impressive feats of engineering that human kind has ever invented.
Oh no they have so good logic!
Me: laugh in order of magnitude
This is why ebikes produce less CO2 per mile than regular bikes. Even if you're getting your electricity from coal, battery and motor efficiency are so much higher than food digestion and muscle movement.
The ebike starts life from the factory with a higher CO2 cost, though, and it never quite catches up over its expected life.
Both are orders of magnitude lower CO2 than a car (both production cost and per mile cost). The lifetime CO2 cost of an ebike vs normal bike is so small, and the gulf between either of those and a car is so big, that anyone pointing to this in favor of cars is an idiot. If an ebike is what gets you to bike more, do it. Any movement from cars and onto bikes is a huge win, battery or not.
Just because I burn less calories on an e-bike doesn't mean I consume less calories, just that I get fatter faster 🤣. All that fat will still turn into CO₂ once I start to decompose.
OTOH, if I get fatter, I'll probably start decomposing earlier, so you might be right that in the long run I'll save on CO₂.
We just need to calcify you for long-term storage to reduce your decomposing CO2 release
It's even worse than that! The calories burned show up in the atmosphere as additional CO2! We need to urgently strap everybody to a chair or bed so they stop burning all those calories!!! /s
This is a real world issue actually!
This means we need accessible cities, and checking what we eat. And also calls for subsidizing electric bikes for everyone.
TIL: If you eat extra beef for the extra calories to cycle those kilometers you generate non-negligible CO2!
Its good we have a study like this to put a number to the argument. However if you already eat to many calories anyway as many people in developed countries do, no additional food would be needed. It also just highlights again how eating meat is worse for the climate than plant based diets.
No one tell them how many calories are in a tank of gas
Every type of anti-environmental person seems to just have no grasp of numbers as a concept. I worked in wind for a while and one coworker was a guy taking a break from the oilfield. He really thought he had something when he was like 'golly is that an oil based lubricant? in a supposedly green energy? hyuk hyuk looks like oil isn't going anywhere.'[this is barely an exaggeration he was a walking caricature of a hick] Just absolutely 0 ability to perceive a difference between burning 100 gallons a day of something vs using 10 gallons a year.
oh man this type of thing annoys the hell out of me. Someone will take the calories of a person cycling per day and say its not great environmentally without taking into account subtracting out the calories required for someone to exist period.
When I was cycling to and from work I burned about an extra 400 calories a day going to spend from work. That's a protien shake.
If the the Dutch are so climate couscous maybe they should invent energy-free travel
Trains are very energy efficient. Is this person advocating for putting trains on every road?
Ohh noooo. I guess if it's the only way.
I see someone's read Reiner Eichenberger's nonsense (and remembers about half of it).
How many calories do Mountain Dew and Cheetos have
we are already overproducing food and throwing it away, so even if there was logic in the idea, it would not actually require additional farming, manufacuring, transportation, etc
What you actually need are walkable cities, transit (trains/buses) friendly neighborhoods, that would make it easy for people.
I am guessing this person was being facetious, but you can never tell with absolute certainty nowadays.
Yeah, their comment is a joke, but it does mention real things that are real problems with our food supply chain. Some of which could be mitigated by growing locally. Because somebody at some point made a problem with vehicles, and they "solved" it with vehicles.
Being that stupid isn't natural. You know they do the opposite of reading a book and putsome efforts to lower their IQ that much.
I have personally wondered about that. Not in a car vs cyclist thing, but cyclist vs public transport.
Not even sure how to do the math on it.
Still, both are surely way better than driving.