THE Solution to our Oil Addiction

i was responding sarcastically to your less than nicely worded response.

i make assumptions- sure it's a little more than 2/45 gal but let me tell you it's cheaper than a hospital bill. i know a lot about hospital bills.

next, maneuverability is nothing over sheer lose-lose situation for the biker in a car-bike accident. not on a busy road with a relatively high speed limit.

finally, i live on the OTHER SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY from the shopping center. same exit, turn the other way. and the only available crosswalks are at the stoplights i mentioned several miles apart.

darell... i understand where you're coming from. but it's flat out not safe here.

when i was in college, i only used my car to get to work in the next town over. i was able to bike everywhere else- i put well over 100 miles/week on that bike for transportation and stress relief.

but the low traffic in town was both a cause and effect for increased bike traffic, if you get what i'm saying.

if they built a pedestrian bridge, i'd use it. until then, it's plain ridiculous to try to cross that traffic on a bike.

 

Look, no one's talking about everyone parking their cars starting tomorrow and setting out on bikes from then on. Obviously there are a lot of changes that have to take place, mainly with ourselves.

We here don't have all the answers and, it seems, we suggest on a grand scale. The rebuttals come in specific to that person's situation. I appreciate your situation of danger but if steps were made to ensure people could ride their bikes safely anywhere, your situation would cease to be dangerous. Until then you're going to have to do what you feel you must do to be safe.

Why don't you petition the city to build that pedestrian bridge or pedestrian access to the mall? Make a change instead of living complacent. I have to deal with people like this every day. They complain about anything and then sit there and take it. It's like they enjoy getting crapped on and bitching about it. If you don't like it, do something to change it.

I'm a Petty Officer, my comment was sarcastic also I almost said I work for a living so don't ever call me a Chief again, but I was afraid my Native American friends wouldn't understand the joke and get butt hurt over it.

 

Let me get this straight. A guy who thinks a bicycle weighs five pounds is telling me I make as much sense as that Prius versus Hummer baloney?

Well, that doesn't really deserve a response. But for my own amusement, I'll go ahead and get the facts on the page once again. I'll try to lay this out simply:

It's not about the calories directly expended in bicycling. It's about the fossil-fuel calories required to produce the food the cyclist eats. As the website I cited originally said with great clarity.

So, putting aside the mythical five pound bicycle:

The energy cost of producing gasoline and the energy cost of producing cars are both small enough to be ignored for this analysis.

The additional energy required to extract oil and turn it into gasoline amounts to about 15% of the energy in the gasoline itself (on average, worldwide). But that same argument would apply to the fossil fuels used to create food, so that is essentially irrelevant to the Prius versus bicycle comparison.

The energy required to manufacture and scrap the typical car amounts to 10 to 15% of the total energy use of the car. Almost all the energy use of a car is in the fuel.

Neither of those magnitudes is large enough to change the basic argument.

The basic research on the average of 10 fossil fuel calories required for the average US edible calorie was entirely for the production of the food. So transportation of the food is important but it's not the main point. The cite I posted above provides a good introduction to the basic facts there. When I calculate total costs (including transport and retailing) from US GDP tables, I come up with about 14 fossil fuel calories per edible calorie.

By far the worst offender is grain-fed beef, which (depending on the estimates) consumes roughly 40 fossil-fuel calories for every edible calorie for the production of the beef alone. Roughly 60 percent of US grain production is for feeding animals.

FYI, a few more food facts: Depending on the data source and the exact method of calculation, in the US, food production/storage/distribution consumes between 15 and 20 percent of total US energy use. By contrast, the entire transportation sector (which double-counts some of the above) accounts for perhaps 28% of total US energy use.

So even a cursory look at the national average data shows that using food as transport fuel may plausibly have significant energy costs. Even when the food is just crude corn ground up for ethanol. But far, far more so when the food is the typical uber-processed US diet calorie.

The main point of all that is that the energy implications of our diet are nearly as large as the energy implications of our driving habits. The Prius versus bicycle example merely illustrates that, as does that excellent "bicycling wastes gas" cite in my original post. Which is really worth looking at.

So, once you get your head around the basic facts, all it takes is a little arithmetic. The average bicyclist, depending on size and speed, will use about 30 calories per mile. If the food comes out of the typical US diet, it took about 300 fossil fuel calories to produce that 30 edible food calories (typical estimate) or perhaps as much as 420 calories of fossil fuel if you include production/distribution/retailing of that food (my estimate from the GDP statistics). A Prius gets 46 MPG. At 30,000 calories in a gallon of gasoline (it varies by formulation), that works out to 650 calories of fossil fuel per mile. Make it 750 if you want to add in the cost of extracting/refining/retailing the gasoline.

In short, a bicyclist would use about 30 edible calories to move the mile, while the Prius would use about 650 calories to move the mile. But the total fossil fuel cost of the bicyclists' fuel was perhaps 420 calories, while the total fossil fuel cost of the Prius' fuel works out to perhaps 750 calories.

As a matter of physics -- energy directly expended per mile traveled -- the typical bicyclist consumes 20x less energy per mile than the Prius. As a matter of total fossil fuel consumed per mile, the typical bicyclist is only about twice as efficient as the Prius. Because the bicyclists' fuel is this precious incredibly fossil-fuel-intensive product that we call food.

Sorry if that contradicts your main hypothesis, but those are the facts. Bicycling is great exercise. My whole family bikes. And, as a mainstream form of commuter transportation it is more energy-efficient that driving solo. But it is not fossil-fuel free, due to the large amount of fossil fuel required to produce an edible calorie in the typical American diet. Eating less fossil-fuel intensive foods (ie vegan) improves your mileage, eating energy-intensive ones (beef) trashes it.

The Bicycle Escape Weight Index

 

What absolute nonsense. How convenient to leave out the energy and materials needed to create the car, because you could obviously create and ship 100 bicycles for the energy and materials to create a small car. Bicycles require fewer lubricants, I certainly don't need quarts of oil to lubricate my bicycle over 5,000 miles, maybe a few ounces. And the calorie conversions are just laughable, do car drivers fast when they are driving, it certainly doesn't look that way. And finally the OP doesn't take into account the full life cycle impact of the car, especially a hybrid. I have bikes that have lasted well over 20 year with steel frames that are completely recyclable. No worries about what to do with any huge batteries.

It's great that you dig on your car, but don't go around demonizing cyclists. Let alone your mythical cyclist who goes around fueling their rides with beef.

 

Can't believe you're trying to spoil all the fun Treespeed.

 

Well, It's the industrial age as it should be. Manufacture stuff, Keep everyone employed and in return keeps the economy hopping. So, Environmentalists step in to say no drilling of oil or no this and no that. We can't have factories, Can't have this and can't have that.

An Environmentalist is a communist. A person with self greed and does not like what other people like to have.

You have a lot of truck driving companys that are in a huge pinch becasue we can't drill for our own oil. Our radical goverment will take other means into place and that is foreign oil. We have supplies all over the world that we can touch because of regulations. China says **** you we're drillin and we sit and take it right in the nice person.

I work in the trucking industry. My brother did as well but he was just layed off a week ago. He aint gonna find another job at all.

My Grandma said that liberals and environmentalists will take over with out firing a shot.

34 American auto manufacturing facilities has been shut down since 2001. What came in its place? A foreign manufacturer. Why did all of our jobs get shipped out of the USA? N ochoice becasue of environmentalists.

It's a slow take over of our country. I'm not racist, or into segregation but I'm not for diversification.

 

Ah...I love threads like these. It's success if we get just one person to bike to work...errands...ect..one day a week... or even a month. Plus the health benefits you get is what really counts.

 

Okay, so for those making the switch, which bike would you guys recommend? Esp one that can climb hills with ease?

(We're getting into our 40s, and we pass up bike riding often cause it's just too hard on us, where we live. But if we could get good bikes that have gears that can manage the grades without killing us, hey, tell me where to buy!)

 

I'm a teacher. There is a middle school 0.7 miles from my house. BUT I work at a school that is 12.5 miles from my house.

What are we supposed to do? I can't sell my house and move within walking distance of whatever school I'm assigned to. Next year I'll be assigned somewhere else and I have no idea where. Currently the housing market sucks. Why should I take a hit on my property value AND end up paying higher property taxes on a new house? Most teachers can't even afford to live in the same district they teach in. I just put in PV and a tankless water heater. I've put in a garden, fruit trees, drip irrigation, etc. I'm supposed to give that up for I don't know what? What if I get assigned to La Jolla? I can't afford to live in La Jolla. And what about the following year. I was reassign 4 times the first 5 years I taught. When I was doing prep time I went to 10 schools each week.

For some jobs it might be practical. The only way to live near where you work is to stay at the same job for a lot longer than people presently do on average. Office buildings would also have to have residential units and support businesses such as grocery, laundry, hairdressers, clothing etc. all built into their office buildings to allow employees to work and live in the same building. Fine if you're single or don't have children. But what do you do with a family of five?

So, you're talking about aggressive rezoning. No more commercial zones that are nothing but office space and residential zones that are nothing but single family homes. Easy to do if you're starting from scratch. Not so easy on existing cities that are already at peak density.

 

Hahahahaha... this is so ludicrous. It's all the environmentalists fault... waaaah. :hurt:

Thanks to the environmentalists, your Land of 10,000 lakes doesn't look like this:

 

This assumes that you, or anybody else for that matter, eats only the bare minimum calories that you need to survive. Most people eat more calories than needed, and few, if any more, are needed to fuel a bike. What you need to do is figure how many more calories than are needed for you to survive you currently eat, then compare that to how many more you would need than the bare minimum in order to bike. Chances are you and most people would not need more than you currently (over) eat.

 

Not really. You are putting the chicken before the egg. Thanks to our (as a country, and as a culture) allowing freedom of thought and debate, we preserve (mostly) our landscape. Aggressive enviromentalists are just a tool of our culture.

 

Thank you for completely and totally missing the point, and for failing to read what I wrote. I didn't demonize cyclists, I said that I and my family bicycle.

So here's a thought. Instead of bring up anecdotes and throwing insults, why not try reading the thread and then bringing some interesting new facts or argument to the table?

As a former bike commuter (30 mile round trip), I never would have guessed that cars require more maintenance than bikes. But how's about I do just a bit of arithmetic. Driving 5000 miles would burn 108 gallons of gasoline in a Prius ... and generate maybe four quarts of oil to be recycled. Maintenance doesn't change the picture. As stated, based on analyses from the US national laboratories and elsewhere, almost all the lifetime energy use (dust-to-dust) of the vehicle is in the gasoline to fuel it. Which means that it's adequate, for this analysis, to focus on the energy in the gasoline.

One final time, I'll restate the logical progression here.

The original poster started with the hypothesis that substituting human-powered miles for gas-powered miles would free us from fossil fuel dependence. (That's my paraphrase, but it's close enough, given the title of the thread.) In my original reply, I said that would only be true if the additional human-powered miles required no additional food. (Ie., it would only be true if you were substituting bicycling for other exercise you would otherwise get; or if you were in the (temporary) process of burning down stored body fat; or if you could not help consuming excess calories and used bicycling to burn excess calories.) But if you were seriously talking about converting the US fleet mileage to human power, it would require more food calories. (As almost anyone who has ever done serious bicycle commuting well tell you, and as the laws of conservation of energy require.)

The problem is that, as currently produced and distributed in the US, food is itself a very fossil-fuel-intensive commodity. The most cited figure is that it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel to create one edible food calorie, on average, in the US. (I get 14 calories when I calculate the energy cost of production/storage/distribution from the US GDP data, but 10 is enough to make the point). So, while a bicyclist is perhaps 20 times as efficient as a solo Prius driver, in terms of direct calories expended per mile, if the bicyclist fuels those miles with the average American diet, the bicyclist is only about twice as efficient as the solo Prius driver in terms of fossil fuels used per mile.

And, in the worst possible case, as stated in the article I cited, if the bicyclist ate nothing but grain-fed beef, fossil fuel consumption per mile would be higher for the bicyclist. You'd be growing grain, feeding it to cattle, then burning the resulting beef to produce transportation miles. In that extreme case, the huge huge efficiency advantage of the bicycle over the car is outweighed by the huge energy disadvantage of the fuel used.

That's not demonizing bicyclists, you silly. If anything, that's demonizing grain-fed beef and our fossil-fuel-intensive methods of food production. But actually, that's not demonizing anything, that's just getting the facts on the table.

So, I'm just pointing out the facts. If you can plausibly assert that using the bicycle for transport results in no additional consumption of food, you can go ahead and continue to believe that bicycle transport uses next-to-no fossil fuels. But if, as the OP did, you are seriously proposing to substitute bicycle miles for most or (ideally) all US passenger vehicle miles, then you can't plausibly assert that all that transportation energy is somehow just going to appear out of nowhere. You'd have to fuel the US fleet with food. And food, on average, as currently produced here, requires large amounts of fossil fuels.

 

^^The point is, that those food calories are already being eaten. And not being used. Look around you, fat people everywhere. More food than needed is already eaten than needs to be eaten to power bike transportation, so no more would be needed.

 

Hi folks,

I just signed up to address a couple of misconceptions in this thread.

First of all, bicycle safety: There have been hundreds of studies over time that compare bicycle injury/fatality per mile to various other forms of travel. In spite of some differences in both the data and the interpretation of the data, it's fair to say that a cyclist who follows the rules of the road and rides safely is roughly as safe as an automobile driver--probably slightly safer, in fact. There are a number of statistical references regarding the issue roughly halfway down this page if you'd like to see some for yourself:

Is Cycling Dangerous? -- The Risk of Bicycle Use -- Accidents, Fatalities, Injuries, and Benefits

Keep in mind that these kinds of stats only attempt to find accident probability--they don't account for the long term health benefits of travel by bicycle compared to auto or other non-human powered transportation. Taking that into account, if accident probability is close to equal, the added exercise is likely to improve the overall health of the cyclist versus the auto driver.

Next, something needs to be said about this strange "fossil-fuel calorie" argument:

This argument is absolutely bizarre. How can food versus fuel be a meaningful variable? Are auto drivers not eating any food during the day? For this argument to hold any weight, pardon the pun, you have to assume that it takes some massive amount of eating to be able to sustain a bicycle ride, and that the average cycle commuter is eating more than the average auto driver.

Some government stats related to Americans and overweight/obesity are here: N C H S - Health E Stats - Supplemental Analyses of Recent Trends in Infant Mortality Consider that the age-adjusted percentage of overweight/obese Americans over the age of 20 is 66.3. Consider that most cyclists are not overweight or obese (or certainly aren't for very long if they start cyclocommuting regularly). It's logical to assume that the "average American" who isn't cycling eats more than the average American cyclist.

And people who start cycling regularly, for fun or transportation, tend to become more aware of healthy food issues in general. And they're aware of what kinds of foods help to "fuel" aerobic exercise like cycling (which aren't fossil fuel beef products). I have yet to see a bike rack full of bikes in front of a steakhouse or a mcdonalds, but there seem to be an awful lot of cars there! The average serious, daily-use cyclists's food-fuel simply isn't likely to come "out of the typical US diet."

Personally, since I started doing almost all of my errands and commuting by bicycle, I eat distinctly LESS food than I did as an overall less-healthy auto commuter. Anecdotally, most of the people I know who have made the switch eat less, too. And they eat better foods. And we've all been exposed to organic and local food movements that dovetail nicely with getting around by bike. Almost all of the food I eat is organic, grown or raised within 50 miles of my house and purchased at farmers' markets or organic grocery stores. I eat beef maybe once a month (and that's non corporate farm-raised local beef, too). Among the "average American" my diet is pretty unusual, but it's closer to the norm among the average American cyclist.

Bottom line, this "total fossil fuel consumed per mile" argument depends on a number of assumptions about cyclists' diets and auto drivers' diets that I highly doubt are true in most situations.

If you want an actual energy efficiency comparison between biking and gasoline power, consider the estimate on this page: Howstuffworks "Is there a way to compare a human being to an engine in terms of efficiency?" That's a more realistic comparison of the actual machine efficiency in terms of converting the potential energy involved into kinetic energy.

Thanks for your time.

 

So, if I read this right, you're saying that because Americans are fat, we therefore must be eating enough calories now to fuel all of our transport needs by bicycling.

That's not supported by the facts.

Americans are fat, that's true, but not nearly fat enough or well-fed-enough to replace all existing vehicle miles with bicycle miles.

The average US BMI is 29, the threshold for not being overweight is a BMI of 25, the average US adult weighs 188 lbs. Assuming the excess weight is pure body fat, that's an average of 30 lbs of fat. In addition, the average US adult gained 2.5 lbs last year (which was exceptional, it's typically just over 1 lb).

ARAMARK: Americans Are Heavier than Ever – and Don’t Know It – According to ARAMARK Research

So, to fuel the bicycling, you have the current stock of body fat to burn, once, plus the excess calories that are being converted to additional annual weight gain, which you can burn every year. How far would that get you?

Body fat is most often cited at 3500 calories per pound, though I have read much smaller numbers than that. But lets go with that.

At 30 calories per mile, the current stock of 30 lbs of fat would get you 3500 miles. Once. In addition, the annual weight gain would get you about 300 miles a year, indefinitely.

So, I'll go as far as to say, sure, we can lose weight. That'll get us a one-time free 3500 bicycle miles. Then, at current dietary levels (as revealed by annual average weight gain), our current dietary excess will get you about 300 free bicycle miles a year. Anything beyond that would have to be paid for in additional food calories or in substitution of bicycling for other calorie-burning activity.

I believe the US averages about 12,000 passenger vehicle miles per capita per year. Might be as low as 10,000, but I don't feel like looking up the exact number. (That of course ignores all other transport such as flying, public transport, and the like.)

Anyway, in the long run, 300 free miles per year, that's what's supported by the data on weight and weight gain. You can get a more liberal estimate of excess diet calories from various theoretical calculations (ie, the average man needs 2400 calories but eats 2600), but those aren't worth much. You'll also see nutty citations to the effect that the average American eats 4000 calories a day, but those are from people who do not understand the difference between USDA (food production) and CDC/NHANES (food consumption) data. The only hard data is weight gain, and that's what I've based this on.

Should Americans substitute bike trips for what would otherwise be car trips? At current levels of calorie intake and physical activity, sure, some more of that would be great. But thinking that bicycle transportation could displace a large fraction of US car transport, with no additional energy inputs, is just not supported by the facts.

 

Let me see if I have this right. You're saying that if I exercise heavily I'll need to eat fewer calories to maintain body weight than if I were a couch potato?

That's not only contrary to the notion of conservation of energy, it's contrary to every controlled study of this issue. Should I believe that marathon runners, Tour de France competitors, professional football players, Army Rangers (etc etc.) eat less food when they are in training? Or do they eat thousands of calories more than the US average when they are training? It's the latter.

Well, at this point, I give up. If you want to believe that the energy to propel a bicycle comes out of nowhere, there's no arguing with that.

 

The main problem with your argument is that your assuming that if I eat 1,000 kcal less each day that food production will decrease in direct proportion to that, which is clearly not true. Also, if you're going to factor in the costs of transporting food (which may or may not be eaten by anyone) you also need to factor in the costs of transporting gasoline to your local service station, stopping and re-starting your Prius to refuel, manufacturing your Prius, transporting and stocking replacement parts, maintaining servicing facilities at dealership and auto shops, repairing roads damaged by accommodating your 3,000+ lb vehicle, etc., etc.

In the end, riding a 30 lb bicycle is going to be several orders of magnitude more efficient than driving a 3,500 lb passenger vehicle. There's just no way around the physics of it. There is a cost to get food to your table but there is also a cost of getting refined gasoline from a hole in the ground to your gas tank.

 

No, I'm saying that I eat BETTER foods that are more "fuel efficient" than the foods I ate when my modes of transportation didn't give me any exercise. And I eat less of them because eating as much as I used to or eating greasy food like the beef products you're fixating on make me feel gross now that my body is functioning more efficiently.

And I'm also saying that the typical bike commuter is in no way exerting Tour de France levels of energy. I don't know how you bike commuted, but most of us are taking a brisk-but-still-casual pace. We're not necessarily talking about "heavy exercise;" we're talking about people riding a bike the less than 15 miles at a time--the majority of American car trips are less than 15 miles. That's not heavy exercise on a bike at a moderate pace. AND I'm saying that athletes in training are using carbs for energy, not hamburgers and steaks.

I think the problem is that you're fixating on calories without putting the (healthy) lifestyle that generally falls into place among regular cyclists into context. And caloric energy intake from foods isn't equal in every type of food by volume/mass.

And in the long term, the kinds of fossil-fuel-for-food issues you're talking about would start to change if lots of people switched to people-powered travel, too, because there would be a generally heightened awareness of those issues that our car-centric culture simply has no context for consideration.