Johann Patlak mentions alternative fuels in his Tuesday, April 13 Wespeak (“Ferraris, Porsches guzzle gasoline too”); I’d challenge both him and Dylan Osborn to consider alternative transportation methods. Check this out – bicycles are the most efficient means of transportation known in the entire biological world, consuming just 35 calories per person per mile. Walking is about a third as efficient, consuming about 100 calories per person per mile. Taking the bus costs about 900 calories per person per mile, and driving a car about twice that, at 1800 calories per person per mile, or about 50 times less efficient! One hundred calories, or the energetic equivalent of eating one apple, would carry you about 3 miles on a bike. In a car, this 100 calories would take you about 290 feet, without taking into account any of the energy losses involved oil refining to produce gasoline (of which there are many). Since a bike is powered by your legs, it can be fueled by just about any renewable resource you can get down your throat (including ethanol, which is cheap and abundant in 12-ounce aluminum cans and 15.5 gallon kegs on college campuses)
They’re also FAR more space efficient; 18 bikes can be parked in the space of one car, and 30 of them can move along in the expanse that one car consumes. That means that in heavy traffic, bicycles actually get more people to where they need to go in LESS time than cars. To move 40,000 people across a bridge in an hour, it takes 3 lanes of a given size to move them across using automated trains. Four lanes of the same size are required to move them using buses, and twelve lanes would be required if everyone drove. On bicycles, however, only two lanes of that same size would be required to get everyone across in one hour.
Further, half of all commutes in the US are less than five miles. This is a reasonable distance to ride a bike, and it’s also the range in which cars get the poorest fuel mileage and emit the most pollution.
Bikes take a mere fraction of the amount of resources that it takes to produce a car, at a fraction of the cost, and they are of equal durability. They also require a fraction of the infrastructure required by cars to get around. So, if you’re concerned about minimizing your use of resources in order to save the planet, the question isn’t why you would commute by bike, but why wouldn’t you?
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