THE Solution to our Oil Addiction

Here is an even better idea, and you don't have to buy a bicycle: live within walking distance of everything you need. That's what we do. Unfortunately, just like the bicycle suggestion, it won't work for most people in our country, or at least won't work without major restructuring in our cities and lifestyles.

Tom

 

if everyone biked... sure. until it's safe to ride a bike on the highway, there's no way i'm biking to work. and that whole thing about crossing 6 lanes of busy traffic to get to the grocery store kinda sucks too.

i'd love to bike but i prefer to keep my body intact.

 

That's why we have those little things called crosswalks, if used properly will decrease the likelyhood of death by 98% (arbitrary statistic not based on imperical data)

 

great assumption there, chief.

let's see... if i go east... we're looking at 5 miles before i see a crosswalk. oh, did i mention no bike lane and 45 mph speed limit that people usually take at 65? west... well, i'm guessing that's within 3 but it's at a clusterf#$k intersection of three separate main roads plus a major highway on and offramp.

so that's either 11 miles or 5 miles one way in 90 degree weather, the shorter route which will probably get me killed anyway, to go to the store a mile away just because it happens to be on the other side of the road.

yeah, i'll use 2/45 of a gallon of gas and just guarantee my safety thanks.

that's a big fault of living right off the highway at an exit that happens to contain one of the area's biggest shopping centers.

 

I think it's a great solution if it makes sense for you. I went with solar panels on the roof + electric car. In the end it depends on your particular circumstances.

 

First of all I'm not a chief.

Second, how do you know you'll only use 2/45 of a gallon of gas? Do you have a built in flowmeter?

Third, what guarantee of safety do you have? Clearly you'd be more maneuverable on a bike than in a car, should any collision be imminent.

4th, one of the area's biggest shopping centers and no way for pedestrians to get to it other than a vehicle? Somehow I doubt that.

 

Well what about horses? They were the prime solution for 1000s of years. Completely biodegradable, and their dung is one of the best fertilizers. Oh, but of course, we are much more advanced and smarter than our ancestors.. silly me.

 

Galaxee... while I appreciate the reality of your situation, I ask that you please think about what you're saying here. And, yes, I do know that I'm going to sound all preachy.

It isn't safe to ride because of all the cars on the road. So the solution is to... add another car to the road? This is the same reason people drive SUVs. They're scared of all the other big cars on the road... so they have to buy a big car. Where does the madness end? It ends when we figure out how to change things to save ourselves collectively instead of continuing to make sure that we feel safe at the expense of others. It is easy to come up with reasons to drive a car short distances. Much harder to work on changing things to facilitate NOT needing to drive. Eventually we won't have a choice.

I prefer to bike specifically to "keep my body intact." I'd rather die enjoying my bike than to sit behind the wheel of my car killing others.

/preachy

 

It just kills me that we moved away from horse transportation because... drum roll please... the "pollution" that they created.

 

Anguish, questions after fatal crash
I know of more people seriously hurt or killed while using 2-wheeled transportation than 4-wheeled and the number of people using 4-wheeled transportation vastly outnumber the number of people using 2-wheeled transportation. The vast majority of the accidents were not the 2-wheeled transportation person's fault.

Sure, it's anecdotal, but....

 

I'll go fix my bike.

I have a 34 kilometre commute each way to and from work and I'm not fit enough to ride it all.
I considered riding to a local train station 8 kilometres away then train to Adelaide then change trains and train to Mawson lakes to ride the last 5 kilometres to work. This would take about 2 hours in total and cost more than driving a Prius. Then when I get to work I need to shower and change now I need to do this at home but how do I get my uniform to and from work without creases? I work shifts so starting at 7AM requires me to leave home at 5AM, trouble is there is no train that time so I need to leave at 4.30AM, half hour before I get up now, then on afternoons I'd get home at 1AM after a 11PM finish if I can make the train on time, if I'm late I wait another 45 minutes then an extra 30 minutes on the change over so I get home at 2.15AM.

I'd move closer to work but I can't afford the $20,000 tax to sell and buy a new home plus moving costs and my location of employment has changed twice in the last 8 years. There is nothing stopping my place of employment moving to this side of town, there was talk of just that.

I rode a bike to work for 2 years back in my mid 20s and in that 2 years had 2 accidents from cars turning in front of me, both on the same road. I still carry injuries from those accidents. In the thousands of time more hours I have driven in cars and on motorbikes I have never had any bad lasting injury from an accident.

 

The energy from bike riding comes from food. You are substituting food for fossil fuel. No energy is free. All you do is substitute forms of fuel. So far so good, you've substituted away from fossil fuels.

But not totally. Food requires significant volumes of fossil fuels to be produced, transported and stored. In the US, for the average US diet, the most cited figure is 10 fossil fuel calories for every edible calorie consumed (although I get a somewhat higher figure when I work backwards from the GDP accounts).

Using that figure, my weight, and data on energy expenditure while bicycling, I figure that (at the US average diet), I get the equivalent of 66 miles per gallon. If I were to eat nothing but beef, it would get far worse mileage than the average US vehicle. See here:

Bicycling wastes gas? Yes, if your fuel is beef

I don't eat the worst fossil-fuel offenders any more, so I'm probably doing better than 66 mpg. But I'm pretty sure that my family of four, bicycling, still gets worse fossil-fuel mileage than we would, taking the Prius.

There are obvious benefits to bicycling over driving. But bicycling combined with the average American diet offers only modest fossil-fuel savings.

This argument would be modified if the bicycling were substituting for other forms of exercise. In that case, you've diverted the fossil fuels from a pure leisure time activity to productive activity, with no increase in fossil-fuel use. Or, as my former next-door-neighbor (the owner of Bikes at Vienna) is fond of saying, it's a sick society where people drive to the gym.

 

And of course, whether on foot or on a bike, you'd have to keep an especially
vigilant lookout for the exponentially growing, malevolent horde of sinister,
unworldly silent Stealth Prii that are constantly prowling our streets,
and whose sole purpose is to rid the world of the elderly, the young, the deaf,
the blind, and any small furry animals that opportunity presents. :target:

 

Bicyclists never want to hear this. I wasn't all that happy when I figured it out, as it spoils the illusion of purity for bicycling versus driving a car. But it is an illusion.

The information about your car driving friends' diets is not relevant. What's relevant is that if you substitute (say) 30 miles a day of bicycling for 30 miles a day of driving, you'll have to eat more food.

I used to do a 30 mile a day bicycle commute. Depending on your weight and how fast you go, a 30 mile commute would be about 1000 calories of energy expended.

That energy comes from food. You'll have to eat another 1000 calories a day to maintain body weight.

At the US average diet, that would be about 10,000 fossil fuel calories used to produce that 1000 edible calories. A gallon of gas has about 30,000 calories of energy, more or less. So the fossil fuels used to produce the food amount to about a third of a gallon of gas. You'd be getting 90 MPG equivalent. That's better than you'd get in a car, but it's not infinite miles per gallon.

Substitute other forms of exercise for productive bicycling and this argument does not apply. If you habitually eat more calories than you burn, and that can't be changed, use the productive bicycling to mop up those otherwise functionless calories, and this argument does not apply. If you're already overweight and you use the bicycling to deplete stored fat, this argument does not apply for the period over which you are losing weight.

But if you're in shape at a steady weight and don't use this to substitute for other forms of exercise, the argument applies.

So, I too shop off the bike, run my errands, etc. I need the exercise, so I think my miles are free, because I'll cut back on other aerobic exercise. But back when I bike commuted, I can assure you I ate more to fuel the commute.

Eat vegan and you'll get substantially higher mileage. Eat grocery store grain-fed beef and you'll get substantially less.

 

We live just of the highway near both Six Flags and Gurnee Mills. I'd love to try and bike around town but I'd love to live awhile longer even more.