4 ms·

Ah. But sorry, no. It's straight from "how to lie with charts". How much energy is it going to take a human to cross 40000 km (circumnavigate the Earth)? A hum

Ah. But sorry, no. It's straight from "how to lie with charts". How much energy is it going to take a human to cross 40000 km (circumnavigate the Earth)? A human on a jet will require around 2 tons of fuel and around 40 hours of time (fuel economy of about 4L per 100km of flight). A human on a bicycle will roughly take about a year of travel (assuming a fairly reasonable 150km a day). In other words, about 1/50-th of a productive human life needlessly wasted that could have been used to improve the world. Carbon footprint in the US is about 20 tons per year per person, so that's another way to look at a year of missed opportunity that you would spend by cycling instead of flying. This aspect is almost completely ignored when people talk about bikes or public transit. Yes, they are efficient, but their efficiency comes at a cost of several wasted lifetimes of time every day for a large city.

ggm 1y ago
Only if you think the journey doesn't contribute to the lifetime. Exercise is net beneficial and you meet nice people along the way.
- cyberax 1y ago
  Biking doesn't provide all the necessary exercise. It's better than doing nothing, but it also takes away time that can be spent on doing resistance training. That is far more important for bone density and muscle mass.
rckt 1y ago
You can't evaluate bicycle's efficiency in the city only by looking at the rider's consumed energy. There's a lot of other things to it. In a modern city using a bike takes the same amount of time as using public transport. And you exercise while riding and you don't burn any additional energy and you take less space.
- quietbritishjim 1y ago
  Those are valid points to make, but they don't relate to the figure. The chart should just show the raw naked numbers, and then we can layer our understanding on top of it. Something like, "so the chart says air travel is x times more efficient, but given how bad it is for the environment I think..." If the chart is already a mish mash of numbers with someone's subjective opinions of the sort you mention then it's useless.
- cyberax 1y ago
  But then you also need to include the overhead of living in a city (more carbon emissions due to more complicated infrastructure). It rapidly becomes more complex than a calorie chart. And the most efficient way overall? Working from home in suburbs that don't have transit.
  - ajuc 1y ago
    Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside. You don't need to commute far, your water, electricity, gas, savage, road, telecommunication etc infrastructure is shared by many more people per 1 mile. You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal). If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person. Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.
    - cyberax 1y ago
      > Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside. Nope. Cities are incredibly wasteful. For example, if we look at New York City, then a whole 1% of its population works directly as transit workers. And around 3% of the city in total are people just working on running the city. This does not count the expense of capital projects. One mile of Manhattan subway now costs more than 1500 miles of a modern 6-lane freeway. > You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal). Even if you look at the most direct expenses, cities are not that advantaged. And the bigger the city, the more disadvantaged it becomes. The main reason is the complexity, capital projects for things like sewer replacements in cities cost literally hundreds if not thousands _times_ more than in rural areas. It's actually much cheaper to dig extra ten miles of trenches than to pay to dozens of architects, inspectors, and planners to come up with a plan to open up a street in a city to replace a hundred meters of pipes.
      - 1y ago
- IAmBroom 1y ago
  You can't redefine "efficiency" to mean whatever you want it to mean.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
alanbernstein 1y ago
Ok, now for the people using motor vehicles instead of their own muscle power, account for the time wasted at the gym for the equivalent exercise. Or for time at the hospital, due to their sedentary lifestyle. Then account for the various types of pollution and destruction caused by motor vehicles. Or, you know, just appreciate this 2D chart for the two dimensions of factual information it is able to convey effectively.
ajuc 1y ago
The time isn't wasted, it's saving you time in gym and hospital and prolonging your life.
jvanderbot 1y ago
The paper looks at energy expenditure for the purposes of travel. Of _course_ slower methods are more efficient. They didn't include ICBMs but those would be crazy expensive. That's it, that's the whole story. Adding calories for the "other stuff" that happens while travel is occurring is not part of the story.

ggm 1y ago

Only if you think the journey doesn't contribute to the lifetime. Exercise is net beneficial and you meet nice people along the way.

cyberax 1y ago
Biking doesn't provide all the necessary exercise. It's better than doing nothing, but it also takes away time that can be spent on doing resistance training. That is far more important for bone density and muscle mass.

rckt 1y ago

You can't evaluate bicycle's efficiency in the city only by looking at the rider's consumed energy. There's a lot of other things to it. In a modern city using a bike takes the same amount of time as using public transport. And you exercise while riding and you don't burn any additional energy and you take less space.

quietbritishjim 1y ago
Those are valid points to make, but they don't relate to the figure. The chart should just show the raw naked numbers, and then we can layer our understanding on top of it. Something like, "so the chart says air travel is x times more efficient, but given how bad it is for the environment I think..." If the chart is already a mish mash of numbers with someone's subjective opinions of the sort you mention then it's useless.
cyberax 1y ago
But then you also need to include the overhead of living in a city (more carbon emissions due to more complicated infrastructure). It rapidly becomes more complex than a calorie chart. And the most efficient way overall? Working from home in suburbs that don't have transit.
- ajuc 1y ago
  Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside. You don't need to commute far, your water, electricity, gas, savage, road, telecommunication etc infrastructure is shared by many more people per 1 mile. You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal). If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person. Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.
  - cyberax 1y ago
    > Living in a city takes inherently less resources than living in the countryside. Nope. Cities are incredibly wasteful. For example, if we look at New York City, then a whole 1% of its population works directly as transit workers. And around 3% of the city in total are people just working on running the city. This does not count the expense of capital projects. One mile of Manhattan subway now costs more than 1500 miles of a modern 6-lane freeway. > You get effects of scale for basically everything (from school and healthcare, through policing, administration, transportation, mail, deliveries, junk disposal). Even if you look at the most direct expenses, cities are not that advantaged. And the bigger the city, the more disadvantaged it becomes. The main reason is the complexity, capital projects for things like sewer replacements in cities cost literally hundreds if not thousands _times_ more than in rural areas. It's actually much cheaper to dig extra ten miles of trenches than to pay to dozens of architects, inspectors, and planners to come up with a plan to open up a street in a city to replace a hundred meters of pipes.
    - 1y ago
IAmBroom 1y ago
You can't redefine "efficiency" to mean whatever you want it to mean.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

alanbernstein 1y ago

Ok, now for the people using motor vehicles instead of their own muscle power, account for the time wasted at the gym for the equivalent exercise. Or for time at the hospital, due to their sedentary lifestyle. Then account for the various types of pollution and destruction caused by motor vehicles. Or, you know, just appreciate this 2D chart for the two dimensions of factual information it is able to convey effectively.

ajuc 1y ago

The time isn't wasted, it's saving you time in gym and hospital and prolonging your life.

jvanderbot 1y ago

The paper looks at energy expenditure for the purposes of travel. Of _course_ slower methods are more efficient. They didn't include ICBMs but those would be crazy expensive. That's it, that's the whole story. Adding calories for the "other stuff" that happens while travel is occurring is not part of the story.