Why? (Part five of several)
Monday, October 6th, 2008Energy Independence
Even if you’re not particularly concerned about your “carbon footprint”, you might be considering the impact of your daily commute on our national oil imports. The U.S. is the world’s largest consumer of petroleum products, and our domestic production can only supply a small percentage of our daily usage. What about alternate fuels? Hydrogen burns cleanly (exhaust=water vapor), but it requires more energy to obtain than is produced by burning it (c.f. First Law of Thermodynamics). Wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal energy are all very promising, but it will take years for them to catch up to even today’s energy needs; if we can’t also curb our consumption, we may simply never be able to cleanly and sustainably produce as much as we use.
Enter the bicycle: the most efficient form of transportation ever devised. This is no boast: in terms of energy expenditure per mile traveled (over a relatively smooth surface – a requirement for any form of wheeled transport), the humble bicycle and its rider use approximately fifty times less energy than a single-occupancy automobile. (Your average cyclist burns up to 350 calories to go ten miles, while the average car burns about 17500 calories in gasoline.) If decreasing your energy usage is at all on your radar, bicycle commuting is a superb place to start.
FWIW, here are some numbers from the U.S. Gov’t comparing the relative fuel efficiency of various modes of passenger transport, with MPGe, or Miles Per Gallon equivalent (of gasoline) for each one. On the same page, toward the top, Walking is estimated as 235 MPGe, and Bicycling as 653 MPGe. (How many burritos is that?)