Lemond1985

"Freakonomics"? Yes, but what color is your parachute? And this post also completely left out anything about "Think and Grow Rich", "Your Erroneous Zones", "The Millionaire Next Door", or "Rich Dad Poor Dad". What would Suze Orman say???

livedarklions

Oh, come on.

I didn't just randomly call out some best seller. It's really clear what they were trying to do-trying to show people's "common sense" led to the wrong conclusions about bicycles and energy costs, and using physics the way the "freakonomics" guys use economics. It just so happened that they did it very badly.

Does it surprise you that someone would imitate the style of a best seller?

Maelochs

LOL, Livedarklions took the bait.

Everyone could see that the Freakonomics reference was fitting. You got trolled and leaped completely out of the water to grab the lure.

You should have quit after you won the thread.

livedarklions

Zzzzzzzzzz.

Rollfast

Our late leader Tom Stormcrowe weighed much more and got rid of it, so what are you saying?

Leisesturm

I don't think he meant anything personal by it. Or rather, anything personal in his comment was meant (I believe) to apply directly and specifically to someone we have already unanimously agreed is a horse's hindquarters.

fietsbob

Packing materials wrapped around new bikes is a huge amount of plastics going to the dump.
and they are made on factories in Remote locations , shipped across the sea to ports, ,and trucked to warehouses
by the container load,. then trucked again to the retail shops

So each bike has a big carbon debt that riding it will take decades to balance out..
put it on your car to ride starting out of town, it will never catch up..

greatscott

All that you said is true, but you didn't even take into consideration the raw materials to make the bike and the production energy used to make the bike, replacement parts for the bike like chains, tires, tubes, gears, seats, bar tape, etc, etc, you will never pay back the carbon debt that a bike consumed, but that doesn't mean you give up on cycling to save energy because a car has all the above but more of it.

Personally I think global warming no one really cares about, what did I say? so answer this question, if people really cared about global warming and the use of resources and dumping, why do major home appliances now only last an average of 8 to 12 year vs in the 70's they lasted 22 to 28 years? and the new appliances when they do break either cannot be repaired or the cost to repair is the same as to just buy a new one! And everything we buy nowadays has a build in end of service, with most items are designed to fail shortly after the warranty expires.

So until greedy corporations get on the bandwagon concerning global warming and the use of natural resources don't come knocking on my door and tell me what I should do to control it!!! I'm a fan of leaders leading by example.

Clyde1820

It's awfully difficult to get healthier, fitness-wise, sitting in a car as compared to riding a bicycle. (Assuming one goes at a good enough clip on a bike to gain in fitness.) And, healthier people tend to cost vastly less for future healthcare and medical costs, along with related incapacitation effects (on the economy).

True, an hour of workout-level cycling will take more food consumed to fuel it. As compared to more gas produced and consumed to fuel a vehicle.

As for the cost of production of material components to build a given vehicle (car or bike), just in terms of the number and complexity of parts and assembly effort (and the plant size to support such production), it sure seems like bikes should take a fraction of the space, effort, materials and time to build.

No comparison on the ultimate, as-delivered resulting impact upon the air quality. One delivers a nearly unidentifiable amount of toxins into the environment (leeching from the bike frame paint, off-gassing from the bike tires, etc), whereas the other has those aspects x100, plus the exhaust and lubricants and fuels.

In terms of space, a greater number of cyclists can fit on a path/road, and a greater number can fit in a parking area.

The above is a decidedly back-of-napkin approach, but I can't imagine a smaller device with a fraction of the energy inputs and a fraction of the pollutant outputs can result in a net loss for the planet's and humanity's overall health.

fietsbob

Capitalism.. or Survival of Humanity... pick one,

Maelochs

Well, given humanity's track record, I am leaning the other way .....

greatscott

It's not capitalism, it's greed that's at fault here, and even non capitalistic societies are greedy, just look at the destruction that China is doing their lakes, ground, and air so they can make a lot of money.

It's as simple as laws being made that say that things like appliances must be repairable and must have a long lifetime of say 30 years, my parents had a GE dishwasher that lasted 35 years without any repair, a Maytag washer and dryer that lasted 40 years with only one repair on a pump that didn't cost much. A Whirlpool fridge that lasted 30 years with only a seal replacement. If companies could make things that durable way back then they could make things even more durable today. A friend of mine had a LG front load washer, the pump went bad about 8 years into owning it, the repair man said that a new pump installed would cost $800?! so my friend bought another washer. But my friends experience isn't as bad as mine, I bought Samjunk washer and dryer that the pair cost $2,000; along with a Samjunk fridge that cost $2,400 3 years ago, a year and 2 months after the warranty expired on the washer it failed and it cost $155 for a pulley part to be replaced, and the replacement part had steel bearings instead of plastic sleeves! So why didn't Samjunk use steel bearing pulley at the factory? The dryer then went out about 3 months after the washer, again a visit from the repair man and $125 later the belt was replaced. For the last 6 months the washer is occasionally leaks small amounts of oil out of the seal and the oil gets on clothes which means I have to rewash those clothes. The fridge is a huge joke, this damn thing I have to manually defrost it every other month! and the it didn't start doing that till again 2 months after the warranty ended and Samjunk refused to do anything about it even though my problem is so common there is a class action lawsuit against Samjunk for that issue that I have, and Samjunk is fighting it like crazy because it involves ALL of their fridges that have icemakers and that's a lot of fridges out there that would all have to be fixed or replaced, and according to the repair man Samjunk has not come up with a repair and the repair man has no way of fixing it either, so that leads me to believe there is no repair and all those units will have to be replaced if they lose the class action lawsuit which explains why they're fighting it like crazy because that would cost them a ton of money. Needless to say I will never buy any products from Samjunk.

fietsbob

you type for a living apparently.. TL,DR open up the text to be readable..

SylvainG

Not sure if this was mentioned but let's not forget that roads get damage and repairing those roads takes, well, energy, and asphalt or concrete, or whatever they use where you live. According to this chart, a "Fat man on a freakishly heavy bicycle" damages a road by 0.00006 (in relation to an average car) while a Prius damages the same road by a factor of 0.3380, so a Prius damages a road 5,633 more time than a "Fat man on a freakishly heavy bicycle".

Bike Gremlin

Almost 50 years old article on the topic of whether cars, or bikes are sustainable. Sums it up pretty well in my opinion:

https://bike.bikegremlin.com/8209/car-sustainable/

ColonelSanders

With all the research going into self-driving cars, I suspect within 20 years that many people won't own a car, but instead rent a self driving car(when needed) that will be much cheaper than hiring a Uber or taxi to go places.

Bike Gremlin

I'd expect driving to be forbidden in the (near?) future - as too risky.

Kapusta

First of all, this was acknowledged as a back-of-the-envelope calculation.

Second, I think the real message here is that our dietary choices can have even more environmental impact than our decision whether to drive or bike. And I can totally believe that.

ColonelSanders

That's crazy talk.

Bike Gremlin

Crazy it is - the way everything is going.

https://www.boston.com/cars/car-news...omatic-braking

livedarklions

The only problem with that is they couldn't get the back of the envelope math to plausibly prove second. As a matter of fact, their calculations ended up showing the opposite, and they only got as far as they did by assuming that the driver didn't do anything else to burn more calories and/or didn't overeat. Oh, and their bicyclist had to weigh 400+ pounds.

If they wanted to make the point you're suggesting, it would've made more sense to keep the activity constant and compare the environmental impact of the two diets.

Their revision damn near admits the entire thing was a misfire.

Maelochs

Okay look ... the thing was BS fromt he start. The revision proved it. if that isn't clear to people, fine. Keep away from the edge, you might fall off.

wphamilton

Almost as if he used my short summary as an outline for his revision.

mr_bill

wphamilton

Yeh he'd need a very advanced search function to see future BF posts. I'm just bragging that I nailed it.