Energy efficiency of active travel (walking, cycling, ebike) compared to an electric car
Energy efficiency of active travel (walking, cycling, ebike) compared to an electric car
cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/7273195
Not trying to be that guy, but do the bike and walking numbers include the energy from the calories you eat, or the energy needed to produce that food?
I don't think they need to, most people already eat more food than they need to whether they walk or drive. I'd wager the average person wouldn't need to change a thing in their diet and would overall only improve their health by walking more.
I've read that unless the person riding the bike is vegetarian, the ebike actually has a lower carbon footprint than the normal bike. They're still both far better than the car (ice or EV).
And does the car number include the energy needed to extract the oil, refine it, and ship it to a gas station.
It says "electric car"
I wondered that too. I imagine it would be very inaccurate to include that as the amount of calories needed would vary wildly person to person. For example, I burned around 2000kcal to cycle 100km in hilly terrain at the weekend, while a friend burned roughly twice that on the same ride.
Fuck cars, but was it really necessary to compare at such different speeds? Air resistance is a big factor and a proper electric bike can go 45kmh as well. Or the car can drive 25kmh
a proper electric bike can go 45kmh as well.
There's some debate about that. E-bicycles above class 2 (with assistance/drive at over 20mph) are not allowed on a lot of bike lanes, so they're more like electric mopeds
Yes, they are handled differently in a legal sense. This comes with some small changes to usability of e.g. bike lanes, but in terms of practicality it's basically still a bike.
Would still be a better comparison, since this is focused on energy consumption. Or just have the car drive slower, as per my other suggestion.
It depends where you live. Here the limit is 400W. Which is probably not quite enough to hit 45km/h in ideal flat conditions.
The fact remains that cars are faster than bikes. Driving a car usually means going faster and hence wasting more energy. Sure, plenty of people deal with distances that necessitate such speeds to be practical in daily life, but that's a different problem to be solved.
I think the speeds are the average speed of each transport type, so it's fair.
The different speeds are to make sure the graph pushes the agenda of the creator. All of them going the same speed would decrease the disparity between walking and driving.
You got lies, damn lies and statistics.
And this is one of those.
It wouldn't change that much actually. Modern cars are really aerodynamic and the comparatively high weight of electric cars emphasizes the rolling resistance in relation to the air resistance.
This Wikipedia page (https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fahrwiderstand) has an example where 77% of energy goes to air resistance, 23% to rolling resistance - At a speed of 200kmh. Which means rolling resistance requires 5x more energy to overcome than air resistance at 50kmh. (77% -> 77 energy units -> multiply by (50/200)^2 = 1/16, as air resistance depends on speed squared -> 5 energy units, but rolling resistance is independent of speed so it doesn't change (still 23 energy units))
I really like this graph because it helps visualizes scale. Sometimes, people knock e-bikes by saying they are less efficient than acoustic bikes. While that may be true, it's another example of, "Don't let perfect be the enemy of good." As shown here, e-bikes are literally the 90% solution. I really don't think it's worth sweating the potential energy efficiency differences between e-bikes and acoustic bikes. What's really important is reducing car usage.
Acoustic bikes? I think analog may be more fitting here but honestly I'm not sure. I've just never heard acoustic referenced outside of sound.
Acoustic is funnier than analog, and I'm not sure if it's any less accurate than analog. In analog clocks, the passage of time is represented in an analogous rotation of clock hands. In analog sound, the change in voltage on a wire is analogous to the pressure waves you hear as sound. I don't know what is analogous to what in biking.
Also, the opposite of analog is digital, and ebikes are not digital bikes.
It's a joke. Based on e-guitars / acoustic guitars
It's... "manual" bikes, right? Or am I taking crazy pills?
This chart ignores one very important detail. Exercise is good for you. Those bars should be negative since it's good energy expenditure.
You can make anything look bad by removing the next bad comparison though. Like if a pickup truck were there, everything would look good. Remove the car and add a scooter, windsurfing, rollerblading, and rolling downhill, and the e-bike looks bad.
True, but the comparison in this case seems reasonable nonetheless. I just wish they had included fossil fuel cars, too
Not really. The F150 Lightning's efficiency is ~270Wh/km city which means a small EV is only a 50% improvement vs 95% for ebike.
Also, this graph is helpful given our current situation. Maybe once we're mostly at the 95% better than an F150 Lightning solution (e-bikes), it might be worth being concerned with energy efficiency, but we're not there.
Did no one in here catch the fact that the measure of productivity shown here is speed? That is a disingenuous choice to show. For the same trip, a car traveling ten times faster than someone walking will exert (more) power ten times faster too.
The unit of energy is KWH, NOT KW. Take this shit out of here. All it does is make the sub look bad.
kwh per kilometer is the metric on the graph, which is the most relevant to "efficiency". Speed is shown as a side note, it doesn't affect the graph.
Oh yay, just what I want; to be able to go 45km in 2.5hrs and be exhausted by the time I get there.
Nobody is saying that it never makes any sense to use a car, but about 60% of all car trips in America are less than 6 miles (9.65 km). The scale ends there, hence the less than, but a good chunk is probably only 1-2 miles or less (1.6 - 3.2km), which is inexcusable for healthy adults not transporting heavy stuff like a fridge.
Oh yay, just what I want; to live in a dying world with a bunch of self-centered people.
It’s definitely a bit of a tilted comparison to not include any other alternative forms of transit like say a bus with 12 people on it (divide the energy), or a train with 80 people on it.
Oh yay, just what I want; to be able to bike 45km in 2.5hrs, getting fresh air and exercise along the way, hardly costing a cent, seeing the sights, feeling refreshed and invigorated, having a sense of accomplishment and being more connected to my neighbourhood while having almost no negative impact on the environment!
Seeing the sights, feeling refreshed and invigorated
Seeing the sights gets boring when you've done it more than a handful of times. And I'm not sure why, but I don't feel refreshed when I've been out on a bike ride due to the winds. They aren't strong, but they don't need to be when going 18/25.
having a sense of accomplishment
This argument is one I strongly despise cause arbitrary difficulty does not/should not give a sense of accomplishment. Take the bus instead and you'll have that same sense of accomplishment but waste only half the time. Or walk and spend twice the time and get it too.