Trading my Prius for a Bicycle

The way I look at it, you are trading one HSD for a bio HSD.

 

All the best!

 

Watch out for all of the nuts in their cars; be careful.

 

Good Luck and keep us posted if you can.

 

Well you are missing my part of the PNW looks like you are going through Kamloops or such and then heading south along the continental divide, or near it. Keep us posted if you can. My Knees would no longer do that but I would love to live vicariously through you!

 

i hope your chase car is a prius

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Delta Flyer @ Dec 5 2006, 02:34 PM) [snapback]358158[/snapback]</div>

Sounds to me more like trading fossil-fuel-burning transportation for sustainable tansportation. The Prius may be the cleanest and most efficient gas-burning car out there, not counting the two-seater Insight, but it still burns gas and adds carbon and other pollutants to the air. A bicycle operates entirely on renewable fuel (food). There is no comparison!

Good luck and more power to you! And please do ride carefully. There's a lot of idiots out there on the roads. I bet you're going to have great fun.

 

1st of all let me say I admire and envy your effort, but at the risk of being accused of being too narrow minded ...

You say "I will ride to lead by example and show the importance and capability of the bicycle as a means of transportation." Yet, you donate your proceeds to a variety of charities that don't have any obvious connection to bicycle transportation. I think the beneficiaries of your largess probably do plenty of bike riding already. In fact, I would make the case that herculean bike touring is a negative incentive to the harried commuter pondering climbing out of the steel cage and hopping on the dusty schwinn in the garage. Perhaps adding some "bike to work day" themes to your trek would help that message.

As a former, and perhaps, future bike commuter, I would like to 2nd chogan's point that bike commuting does increase your calorie intake at whatever cost to the global environment that might be. By 10 AM I was out of the office heading to the cafeteria to do some carbo loading!

The most interesting counterpoint made to me about bike commuting was that I was doing damage to my lungs breathing all that car exhaust as opposed to sitting in a climate controlled sedan. I was sufficiently piqued to do some googling and discovered a study that, although there is a grain of truth to the argument, the net improvement to your lung's capacity to filter contaminants was positive.

Ride on.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Delta Flyer @ Dec 6 2006, 03:55 PM) [snapback]358625[/snapback]</div>

I'm pretty sure the Wikipedia figure is just the value of the edible calories consumed, not the much larger (10x) figure for the fossil fuel calories used to produce the edible calories. That is, if you consumed 31,000 edible calories (equal to the calories in a gallon of gas) you could walk 230 miles. Several sources suggest walking burns 100-120 calories per mile as an average, which at the high end would yield about 260 miles from that many calories -- close enough to the Wikipedia figure.

But what that doesn't say is that it takes perhaps 310,000 fossil fuel calories to produce the 31,000 edible calories. And, it's the fuel used to produce the food that I'm talking about. Hope that's clear. I see a fair bit of internet discussion that focuses just on the calories in the food, but that's not at all the issue.

So, my translation of the Wikipedia figure is that walking gets you about 23 miles per (fossil fuel) gallon. That's consistent with my 66 mpg on a bike. Bicycling is estimated to be anywhere from 2x to 5x as efficient as walking,depend on whatever (speed, weight).

You're exactly right regarding meat. The website I referenced earlier made the point. The average US meat calorie requires about 10x as much fossil fuel to produce as the average vegetable calorie, mainly because it's all grain-fed meat, and it takes many pounds of grain to produce a pound of meat. The vegan/vegetarian community seems very aware of the fossil fuel issue but few others seem to get it. And that's the diet change we made. Not becoming vegetarians, just switching from grain-fed to grass-fed beef and milk. It was absolutely painless, the beef is cheaper when bought in bulk (though the milk is more expensive), it's clearly far better for you (and for the cows, who were not made to eat grain or to stand in one enclosed spot), and it supports local agriculture. My estimate is that this one change saved the equivalent of between 150 and 400 gallons of gasoline annually for my family (depending on which set of estimates I use for the calculation), as pasture (grass-fed) beef has far lower fossil fuel inputs than grain-fed beef. Switching to pastured beef and milk was zero hardship, had essentially zero money cost, and produced health benefits and substantial fossil fuel savings.

Grass-fed beef is to diet as compact fluorescents are to electrical use: the lowest of low-hanging fruit for energy savings.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(daniel @ Dec 6 2006, 12:51 AM) [snapback]358328[/snapback]</div>

Daniel,

I have a lot of respect for your opinions, but I'm not so sure about the statement above. Not the idiots, that's a given, but the statement about food.

This is off topic but I'd like to bring it up because I was so surprised by the results.

A vegan on a bicycle is about the most efficient form of transportation known, far more efficient that a solo Prius driver. But it's not clear that a person eating the typical American diet gets better fossil fuel mileage bicycling than driving a Prius. And when my family of four bicycles, I'm pretty sure we we get worse fossil fuel mileage then if we'd driven the Prius.

A website with a nutshell overview can be found here:
http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/beef.html

I got to this view because, in reviewing my family's energy budget, I came across figures that 7 to 10 fossil fuel (k)calories are required to produce an edible (k)calorie in the typical American diet. Estimates vary, but the typical vegetable edible calorie requires maybe 3 calories of fossil fuel input, and the typical animal protein calorie requiring vastly more, say 30 or so fossil fuel calories per edible calorie, mainly because US meat and milk production is largely from grain-fed animals. (Some sources show a much larger differential, but on inspection that tends to be a comparison between extremes, not averages; other sources imply a much smaller differential, for reasons I have not been able to pin down.) All that is exclusive of the energy required to store it in the home and cook it in the home.

The upshot is that, taking the 10 calorie figure above, and converting everything to energy equivalents of gallons of gasoline, my family's food consumption required fossil fuel inputs equivalent to a bit over 1,000 gallons of gasoline, versus about 300 gallons of gasoline annually for our cars. Even if the 10 calorie figure is off a bit, the order of magnitude suggests that, for us at least, the carbon footprint of our diet was much larger than the carbon footprint of our driving, by a substantial margin. (We've since changed our diet to reduce fossil fuel inputs significantly.) The calculation for a family of four is straighforward: roughly 8500 edible calories per day x 365 days per year x 10 fossil fuel calories per edible calore / 31000 fossil fuel calories in a gallon of gasoline = equivalent of 1000 gallons of gasoline.

Anyway, I didn't mean to post off-topic like this, but it seems that the fossil fuel inputs to the typical American diet are not widely acknowledged in discussions of energy efficiency. I wanted to take the opportunity to make people more aware of this.

 

Interesting point, chogan. Yes, we should all be more aware of our 'big feet', including the influence of our diets. But in considering the relative efficiences of driving versus cycling, shouldn't we consider only the additional energy required by cycling, rather than our entire consumption? We have to eat anyway, and only a small portion can be attributed to the extra energy required to cycle. Unfortunately, too many of us have already consumed more calories than we need, and cycling only burns off the excess, rather than requiring additional food.

And, if we're going to compare cars to bikes, I think we need to include a little more of the transportation infrastructure, not just the individual car.

 

It was not my intent to cause a lot of dissonance comparing the human muscular system to hybrids.

The point I was trying to make is the human body seldom has all muscles working at one time - it would be a waste of energy. Hybrid engines are closer to Nature by not working the entire engine most of the time. Unfortunately the conventional internal combustion engines runs the entire engine all the time - unnatural.

I'm in agreement that fossil fuels should be used less - not more, but that does not mean human metabolism is completely different than a hybrid car. A sprinter is working anaerobicly - energy without oxygen for a limited time. It's just like the batteries kicking in when passing a car.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(hyo silver @ Dec 6 2006, 08:05 AM) [snapback]358433[/snapback]</div>

Yes, yes and yes.

It IS a great idea to be mindful of all energy consumption that our actions create. Do you take more ice than you need from the soda fountain? We must also put those consumptions into perspective. One must be compared to the other options. For example, taken alone, EVs are a losing proposition. But compared to gas cars, they're WAY the heck better for our environment. And in this particular example of energy for food, if EVERYBODY were to toss their cars and start riding bikes - even though they may eat a bit more, the net result is FAR less energy consumption. Orders of magnitude less.

And finally, back to the subject of the thread...
Good for you, AJ! As a reformed bicyclist myself (been riding every day, but just recently got back into it with more conviction - and two more new bikes) I congratulate you, and wish you the best on your journey.

 

Well, I probably ought to quit here but let me try one more time.

I used to bicycle to work, 3 days a week, from Vienna, VA to downtown Washington DC, about 32 miles round trip with about 400 feet of change in elevation. For a guy my size, that was somewhere near 1500 calories of exercise. At that level of exercise, I really did have to eat more to make up for what I burned, and I was really, unambiguously using additional food calories to fuel my commute. That's unsurprising, I think. At that level, anyone would have to do the same to maintain constant weight.

The only interesting point is that, if the 10-fossil-fuel-calories-per-edible-calorie is in fact correct, the 1500 calories of food translates roughly to the fossil-fuel equivalent of about a half-gallon of gasoline (1500 edible calories x 10 fossil fuel calories to produce one edible calorie / 31000 calories per gallon of gas = 0.48 gallons of gasoline equivalent).

So, in round numbers, on my commute to work, I was getting about 66 mpg on my bicycle.

Obviously, caveats abound. This is in many ways an incomplete analysis; if you only bike a little bit then the energy requirements may be lost in your diet or taken care of by excess calories already consumed; if we really had to bike everywhere we'd travel a whole lot less; there are health benefits; the emissions would be produced in less populated areas; and so on. I wouldn't defend that number very hard.

And I'm not slamming bicycling. I'm just -- I don't know -- sad to realize that the fossil-fuel-intensive nature of American food production has in effect spoiled the environmental purity of bicycling for me. I wasn't getting infinite mileage, the way I used to think I was, I was getting a stinkin' 66 MPG. I'd have been better off riding the Metro.

Well, I'm clearly not going anywhere with this. My only point, which I think everybody got, was that the American diet is fossil-fuel intensive. Just that it may matter more than you might otherwise think. The numbers suggest that the average Prius driver consumes slightly more fossil fuel in terms of food than in terms of gasoline.

Let me put it this way -- if you're driving your Prius down the road eating a double cheesburger, and it takes you a mile to eat the cheeseburger, the way I do the math, for that mile, you're getting about 2 MPG in combined gas&food fossil fuel consumption. Damn, now I have to stop eating in the car.


<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(ajrowell @ Dec 5 2006, 04:10 PM) [snapback]358123[/snapback]</div>

Also, that's a nice list of charities. Please ping us again when the donations page is up.

 

Somewhere in Wikiapedia, it stated that walking is 230mpg (got to be an educated guess and at the mercy of whoever entered it).

I'm not vegan, but expecting someone who is to say eating plants is more sustainable than the equivalent amount of meat.

 

For a moment there I thought you were going to Alaska now!
There's no daylight and it's 30 below!
Then I saw that this will be in June 07....