The point of walking is that if you throw out the cars then everything is much closer together, and then you don't have to walk a mile. If I start from the Ferry Building in San Francisco and walk a mile up Sacramento street, I'll pass thousands of establishments of all kinds. If I start at the Ponte Vecchio in Florence and walk a mile I will pass literally every single thing there is in the old city. In a walkable city you'd never need to walk a mile, so finding out what is the most energy efficient mode of going a mile is relatively pointless. What you actually need to know is the most energy efficient form of building, not the of transport.
And then there is the flaneur.
It purely was looking at the cost in fuel of go a mile compare to other transport.
Be it across a current city, desert or large dessert.
http://freakonomics.com/2012/11/07/can-mass-transit-save-the...
It's an anti-transit argument based entirely on energy per passenger-mile traveled, which is only relevant if you think a passenger-mile is a good thing which should be maximized.
Unscripted Theatre Company > Johnny Foley's > Tadu Ethiopian Kitchen
In five years time, this will probably not be the case.
If I was an Ethiopian restaurant owner would I prefer a restaurant in a dense neighborhood with five families living in apartments right on top of me, or would I prefer to be in a strip mall at the corner of an American suburb with nobody in walking distance and only a few hundred families within a mile? I know which one I'd want.
Ethiopian restaurant - 12.6 miles
Improv Theatre - 64.9 miles
Dueling Pianos - 65.1 miles
So, if you compare driving to cycling, cycling wins hands down. And, this is with the artificially low cost of fossil fuels. If fossil fuels properly factored in all the environmental damage, cycling's efficiency advantage would be even higher.
Also, a lot of fossil fuels are used grow and transport food the food you eat. It's not immediately obvious to me that the fossil fuel impact of growing the food, transporting it, and packaging it is less than the fuel to move a car in the first place.
"Up to" doesn't mean much. Biking is explicitly considered in the original piece:
> Surprisingly, from a pure energy perspective (using the methodology mentioned above), biking, walking, and running are the three most expensive types of transportation listed
For these reasons it doesn't make much sense to talk about exact figures for energy efficiency of cycling without specifying what type of bicycle, what clothing, what weather conditions, what terrain, what braking technique, how much the rider weighs, their riding position, how fast they're riding, etc. The tires and the drivechain make a noticeable difference too.
This is literally comparing apples and gasoline.
Your body's signals for how hungry you are will not exactly, but still fairly closely, match the calories you burn picking up your new biking habit.
It turns out that about 70-80℅ of what most people consume goes into simply keeping them alive (research basal metabolic rate & daily calorific requirement) and the impact of "work you do" is only a small variation - with the above exceptions.
Also interestingly (unable to search the paper reference on phone) there is research that shows that dramatically different lifestyles like Namib desert nomadic hunter-gatherer vs. typical urban don't actually differ on metabolic rates (accounting for non-fat weight)
I started because I wanted to lose like 8-10lbs during a time when I couldn't exercise regularly at the gym which were lost within about 6 weeks.
I walk fast at about 6KM(my gait isn't very long because I wear either jeans or dress pants and I am of average height, but still I'm doing 130-135 steps per minute) an hour according to Google Fit/Apple Health, and I walk between 11-15KM a day (~2-2.5 hours I take a longer route through Hyde Park if the weather is nice and I'm not in a rush getting to or from work).
This daily walk alone increased my daily rough caloric requirement to about 2800-3000 calories, that's 600-800 (k)calories over my daily default if i don't do any physical activity other than getting up and commuting to work on the tube. If i don't increase my caloric intake i would lose between 0.5 and 1 KG a week so in this case and in every other case the "food expenditure" isn't a sunk cost, now you might say that my caloric intake doesn't have much impact on the grand scheme and you would be correct, if I need to eat another slice of pizza or another muffin it doesn't affect anything in the long run, if anything it probably means we might "waste" a bit less food. But given the current cost of each food calorie that you intake if everyone all of a sudden goes up to 3000 Kcal daily requirement it will have an effect on the environment and the economy.
What you should take from it is not that walking is bad for the environment but is that the global food production is highly inefficient ATM, food is cheap especially in the US but it comes at a pretty big price also.
[1] Can't find a great all-encompassing source, but e.g.: http://www.c2es.org/publications/cost-us-forest-based-carbon... says $30-90 per ton
[2] Burning as is about 9kg CO2 per gal. http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.cfm?id=307&t=11
The article on travel efficiency shows that a walking person requires about 210 calories per hour at 4 km, about 2.5 miles/hour, call it 85 calories/mile. For an American consuming 2500 calories/day, a given hour requires about 104 calories: divide that by 2.5, reckon 41 calories in the time it takes to walk a mile. Now the cost of walking over resting is about 42 calories, and we have walking down about where he has biking.
Please correct me, for it's likely that I have missed something here.
edit: people travel farther distances in cars than on foot, usually. nobody would replace a 20 mile commute by car with 20 miles of walking.
Also the cost of driving should really use the average fleet fuel economy of a country together with the fuel price in that country. That works out to a hair under 10¢ per mile for 2014 fuel economy and today's gas prices.
The takeaways remain the same, though: Human-powered transportation isn't especially efficient (unless you're burning calories you would have eaten anyway), and driving is subsidized up the wazoo in the US.
The article's conclusion including ownership cost fits my intuition pretty well.
http://www.keith.seas.harvard.edu/blog/climate-impacts-of-bi...
If you eat a lot of meat and bike, you could potentially have a bigger carbon footprint than a very fuel efficient vehicle.
Thanks for sharing. It's interesting to see though that a biking paleo dieter is still 2x as efficient from a passenger-mile standpoint as a roughly average 25 mpg vehicle, and the average US diet is still better than a double occupancy Prius.
For the vast majority of Americans, that assumption is incorrect. From personal experience, it's actually the opposite: I eat less on the days where I go for a long walk.
That should be ~20 Wh per mile, so 0.2¢ per mile with some of the pricier electricity in the US.
Glancing at the wikipedia article which the author uses doesn't clarify this, nor does Wikipedia's citation. I didn't check the citation's citation.
Clearly we want net calories. Average humans burn ~100 kcal per hour doing their normal activities during the day, so that could potential change the figure from 210 kcal per hour walking, to 110.
I can't imagine the person driving doesn't spend as much or more than the person walking on food.
If we are saying that this small amount of money VS drinking oil is where the line is crossed, then are we not all comfortably well past this zone anyways?
So another way of saying this is listening to music is most efficient if you listen to a pre recorded song or you whisper only.
(We have of course long improved on bicycles. An ultra aero lowracer recumbent can get 30mph on 120W, covering the 100k for a mere 1kWh at average 25% efficiency)
https://www.missionbicycle.com/store/home/gift/53-miles-burr...
Although if Wikipedia's energy figure is right, that's a 2279 kcal burrito (which you could probably find somewhere in San Francisco, but...).
https://chipotle.com/nutrition-calculator
and added the highest-calorie individual meat (steak), rice (white rice), beans (black beans), salsa (chili-corn), sour cream, cheese, and guacamole, and still got only 1365 kcal.
While adding every single topping does reach 2425 kcal, one would have to order 4 kinds of meat, tofu, 2 kinds of rice, 2 kinds of beans, fajitas, 4 kinds of salsa, sour cream, cheese, guacamole, and lettuce. I would think that should count as "trying"! :-)
There's a huge opportunity cost of not being able to travel as fast and far as a car lets you. You can't* get an Uber or bum a ride from a friend to your mother's house in the middle of nowhere on Christmas morning. There's few parts of the country where walking/biking year round is feasible.
*at a reasonable price point.
Nobody should buy a motorcycle imagining that they have lower operating costs. Aside from fuel, motorcycles have high budgets for tires, engine maintenance (due to the aforementioned appetite for high specific power, and relative lack of scale in their manufacturing), insurance, likelihood of theft or other total casualty, need to continuously refresh your riding apparel on approximately 5 year basis, expensive consumable items like drive chains and sprockets, and so on and so forth. Also there is generally a lack of miles over which to amortize the time-denominated costs like insurance.
