Maybe the most surprising thing here is that regular biking is still twice as efficient as e-biking even given our mediocre metabolic efficiency and a physique that isn’t exactly designed for the bicycling motion.
It makes sense to me…
For example if the the e-bike rider had to spend 1/5 of the energy of the unpowered cyclist (numbers chosen for the example’s sake) that would be 1.1Wh/km they exert.
The remaining 12.9Wh/km would be what was discharged from the battery while riding (from using pedal assist and/or throttle features). This can be measured when you charge it back up at the end of the trip to the previous level.
it also has the Ebike going ~40% faster which means almost twice as much friction to overcome.
Seems to be meaningful that all of the speeds should be the same.
To be meaningful, they should reflect the real-world imo. Which I they attempt to do? 18km/hr seems really slow for non-ebike (my last commute home by acoustic bike before I got an ebike was 27.0 km/hr), but I guess casual riders might go that speed?. If you use a class 3 ebike in the US, the ebike speed is also really slow (for class 1/2, its about right - I typically get 26km/hr). In Europe, speeds are typically less than the US for ebikes. And I think European urban speed limits tend to be less than US? Of course there’s also traffic, so there are times when cars average less speed than bikes. Depending on location and time of year, how intensely the AC/heater in the car is running may significantly impact traffic fuel efficiency. They could have just included a few different speeds for each option, I suppose.
If you want to apply it to CO2, you need to convert that energy into CO2, but that’s also really dependent on energy source. Coal power will be a lot worse than solar and wind. Typical US beef will be a lot worse than chicken or wheat or solar/wind energy. So, you would need a second chart and then do the calculations. For the average person whose ebike speed and acoustic bike speed are nearly the same, the ebike is better in terms of CO2. If someone gets specifically cleaner energy sources, then it would be a lot better. OTOH, someone connect to a grid that’s mostly fossil fuels, but eats a low-CO2-emitting diet, the acoustic bike might be slightly better.
The solution has always been better cities and better mass transit. EVs are a distraction.
Let me just travel 30km to the shops by foot and carry shopping home another 30km back again
That means the urban planning in your area is garbage. That is fixable and has to be fixed.
Wouldn’t go as far as calling it urban, it’s a few streets on a mountain
A few streets on a mountain can and should have a grocery store. For the occasional specialized needs, rural residents can use comparatively inefficient modes of transport because of their relatively small number. There’s still a huge margin for better efficiency and planning.
there’s always outliers. don’t worry noone is saying you need to walk in those circumstances
I know it’s hard to understand for vroemers but you can pick the area you live in.
Actually was priced out of everywhere else
Also carry 4 other humans with you when you go
Have you heard of this miraculous thing called public transit? And there are things called panniers which are pretty cool too.
But frankly, if you don’t have groceries within walking distance, your neighborhood and your zoning laws are very poorly designed.
And that’s deliberate. Neighborhoods around the world are designed to require cars to live in, because of oil company lobbying, and also for “security”, in order to keep out people too poor to own cars.
Getting rid of cars requires changing the various ways our cities are designed to make cars necessary. That’s worth doing too.
My neighborhood pre-dates cars
It might’ve had grocery stores in it before, or tiny lawn stores and such. It might’ve also just been very poorly designed.
Can confirm. It takes an hour to walk to the city. I have 3 grocery stores within 10 min of walking.
Living outside land of the free, I have like 4 grocery stores and 1 supermarket within 15min walking distance, and I don’t live in a dense neighborhood.
I don’t live in a city.
I used to live in a place that was somewhere between suburb and rural and I loved not being around people but I hated not being able to walk to get basic necessities. Now I live in the city and I have everything I could ever need within a 15 minute walk and I get to choose whether I pay for a car, a licence, plates, insurance, gas, maintenance and repair. This system really has us fucked into believing that this is the way it should be.
In this graph a bus would be a lot worse than a far given the massive size, aerodynamic brick wall, and constant stops.
Yeah but you have to divide the footprint by the average number of travelers.
This should include gas cars too which are ungodly inefficient
This should be shown in Km/Wh so the more efficient the modes of travel show as bigger bars.
yes, I thought it was backwards and was quite surprised
Energy efficiency and carbon footprint are very different things - pretty sure the carbon footprint of 15 big macs (8500kcal) is substantially greater than 1L of gasoline (let alone an electric grid equivalent)
In this regard, a vegan cyclist is going to beat out anyone in a car.
A quick googling tells me a burger is about 3kg of CO2 equivalents. 1L of gas seems to be about 2,5kg.
Now if you were to eat local and seasonal food I’d guess you can get more efficient than burning oil.
that’s one burger, you would need at least a dozen burgers (14.2 big macs) to match a liter of gasoline (8340 kcal)
Damn, my brain got way to happy about the numbers being so close that I completely overlooked that. I’m gonna defend myself by saying that this was early in the morning ;)
Edited my original comment to reflect this fact.
Interesting. I’ve never owned an electric car, but just guesstimating based on those numbers, my daily commute would cost something like 25 cents in electricity. Not too shabby.
I did buy an ebike a few years back and watched to see how much the bill went up, but frankly never noticed any change. At 2 cents per day, it’s basically a rounding error relative to other electrical usage, so that makes sense to me now.
Keep in mind that although an electric bike might use more energy input than a regular road bike, it uses a much cleaner type of fuel. Even the most dirty coal power plant in the world has a significantly lower CO2 output per watt hour than the food you are eating to power a bicycle. Even if you are vegan
Wrong.
Coal power has a CO2 intensity of ~1 g / Wh (source: IEA)
A plant based diet has a CO2 intensity of ~1 g / Wh (source: ourworldindata)
Production CO2 intensity of a bicycle is also lower than an e-bike.
Pedaling under your own power also has health benefits, which the e-bike rider would need to do additional exercise to achieve, thus increasing their total CO2 intensity further.
In short, sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up about shit you clearly don’t understand.
A plant based diet has a CO2 intensity of ~1 g / Wh
Yes, and since our metabolism is very inefficient you actually need to eat almost 4 watt hours worth of food for 1 watt hour of energy output, everything else just turns into body heat. Meanwhile ebikes have an efficiency of roughly 70-80% when accounting for charging losses and motor efficiency.
EBikes are awesome. I live in a hilly area where riding is tough. EBikes allows people of all ages and abilities to get out. Even with the assistance you still burn calories… as long as it’s assisted peddling and not the illegal bikes I see delivery guys riding.
I ride road bikes but when I get older and less capable I’ll certainly invest in an ebike.
While I like this chart, it’s useless without the tradeoff. It also needs to map speed to time spent. What is being given up for improved efficiency? The inflection point is how you move people from point A to point B.
The biggie is urban planning to ensure that people don’t need to travel huge distances on a routine basis. That means that people give up very little.
How does biking or walking consume energy ?
Food tends to have significant energy inputs in the form of methane gas used in the production of nitrogen fertilizer, diesel tractors, transportation, and cooking
You burn calories when you exercise
My 30km round trip bike to work burns about ~800 calories, or 1.33 big-mac equivalents, which has a carbon footprint of about 4.2kg CO2
That same round trip would burn 2L gasoline in my car, which has a carbon footprint of about 4.6kg CO2
Edit: I see where you are getting your numbers now after looking around. I will leave my comment here for sake of others seeing it and the discussion.
How are you getting 4.2 kg of CO2 for 800 cal???
The average estimate is 0.35 per 1000 cal for the more eco friendly
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/ghg-kcal-poore
https://www.globe.gov/explore-science/scientists-blog/archived-posts/sciblog/index.html_p=183.html
If you are eating stupid amounts of meat every meal, sure you might average that high.
And more than that, the food is just CO2, arguably not as bad of a GHG. the petrol/gasoline also has the really bad stuff people don’t bring up as much, such as the nitrogen-oxides and sulfurs.
This would be much more efficient if it had other transportation as well.
Like non-electric cars, trains, subways, etc.
It’s not too hard to get their efficiency as well.
Also biking and walking are not necessarily even viable for certain commutes such as any over about 4 miles/ whatever that is in kilometers say 8, and anytime I need to carry heavy luggage / groceries. Or anytime anybody with mobility issues needs to travel.
It’s all very well insane if we wanted to buy an e-bike and get rid of their car but that’s not really practical.
<7km is too far to bike?
Oh man. Well, I agree on the other things you said, but… 6.4 km isn’t that much. It’s a fair bit, yeah, but not that much. With an e-bike, it’s not really even a thing. I chose to use the healthcare in the next city over (I live on the border of two cities) and I have about ~7km whenever I go there. 10-15 min with an ebike. With a regular one it’d be a chore, but it wouldn’t take much longer, 20-25 minutes maybe with a loose pace.
But yeah biking definitely can’t replace everything. I mean, cargo bikes exist, but still.
With mobility issues, we now have a lot of mobility “scooters” that go about 25km/h per the EU regulations. Like a super buffed up wheelchair. with a sort of chassis. Small enough to fit in the back of a taxi-van that has a disabled lift, but still quick enough to use in a similar way as a bike.
Still tho. I want my cheap rental ecars.
Bikes don’t have to replace everything to make a big difference. Something like “use them as the default choice for shorter distances” makes a big difference.
Based on this chart, electric car is a best way to burn calories
If you’re charging it with your own muscles, sure. Or you could just put rocks in your panniers.
The joke is that calorie is a unit of energy, and it’s the car that’s “burning the calories” instead of your body
This kills the
crab.
Thanks a lot for linking the source!
you’re welcome. It’s something I try to do routinely.
Yeah, micro mobility is great on paper when you’re young and live in an accessible city with flat topography. Years ago I became (and still am) a bicycle commuter and I am ENTIRELY SICK OF IT. I want a fucking car. I am tired of biking in the rain and the snow and the cold. It fucking sucks.
Also If I didnt have the ability to purchase an e-bike recently I’d be fucked with the terrain of the place I am currently stuck living (and even that doesn’t quite cover the situation).
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
It was fun 10 years ago but now I’m just like give me a fucking cargo van.
Had a neighbour in his 80, had multiple leg operations and he still used to take a daily bike ride to keep fit. Not to mention that even if bike commutes suck, they improve your mental health considerably, even if you go in the rain/cold.
And most importantly of all, those who can take the bike cover those who can’t. So please enjoy your car ride, but take the bike when you can.
Do you personally commute by bike 100% of the time for literally every outing to get to work or run errands? Because I do, and have for a decade. I’m over it.
I’ve been telling everyone how most people don’t need a car in a big enough city (I’m in Europe), and how much more efficient (PROPER) public transport is.
…And then I get the work commute metro trains where stupid/inconsiderate/disgusting people still get on the packed train despite being sick, keep standing in my kidney and sneeze/cough at others (without a mask, of course) and sniff their nose all the way. Every single time when that happens I dream about having my own car where I don’t have to deal with this (or an idiot blasting TikTok from their speakers, being drunk+loud, smelly, etc.).
I still won’t have a car, but man, sometimes the right decision isn’t the easiest.
I live in a city with very good public transport which I use constantly. I also have an E-bike.
However, one needs to note that if I buy something big (extra lot of groceries, a new computer, a painting, anything that doesn’t fit in a backpack), using PT is pretty inconvenient. Especially when I’d be faster just carrying the thing home from Ikea, since I only live some 2km away, but the bus routes don’t go across the boroughs (but radially from the center outwards, with a few “lateral” buses), so I’d take two buses and it’d be some 10km. And if it’s raining and I have an item that shouldn’t get wet…
Also, taking a cat to the vet for instance.
I’m just waiting on when public transport will be supplemented with small city EV-s you can rent for a few hours cheaply. Like those e-scooters, but small cars, and with more regulations.
I know an apartment building which gives the tenants (mostly young students) the option to reserve and rent an EV for just a few euros an hour. And you don’t need to fill the tank, so it’s pretty nice.
Urban planning issue
No amount of urban planning can solve a 300 year old city built in a 10,000 year old hilly mess of a glacial valley.
ebikes with regenerative braking could do very well in that environment. Try taking a look at what’s within 15 minutes by bike
I know what’s 15 minutes away by bike because I bike everywhere I go. Doesn’t change the fact that I am sick of it.
Walk a bit. Take a bus. Buy an electric scooter. Move. All decent options
Busses barely provide any service where I live. Walking is useless because nothing is close enough for that to be a viable option. I have an electric scooter, it is useless because of the local terrain (and is just as shitty as biking as a means of transport anyway). And sure, yeah, just “move” because that is so simple to do.
Sounds like it should keep you fit.
What kind of injuries?
I completely understand the weather thing. In the Netherlands it doesn’t get that cold, but the rain is really annoying (it rained basically non-stop from october till late february). In the city where I live however, there is also a pretty good bus service, so you can avoid cycling longer distances in the rain. For me I find cycling in good weather so good for my mental and physical health that I wouldn’t want to go without it.
You say an e-bike doesn’t quite do it for you, and I’m curious what you mean. Is it that it doesn’t have the range, that the engine isn’t strong enough for hills, or something else? I would love to learn about more disadvantages of micromobility, so I can create more nuanced opinions.
I used to live in Boston, which in recent years has become very bike friendly and is actually setup to make sense using a bike for primary transport (fairly robust public transit for the US, physically pretty small), but now I live in a city in Massachusetts where the area has very little bike infrastructure, and the landscape is hills and valleys of hundreds of feet of varied elevation every half mile or so. Using a non-electric bike for daily errands / transport would be equivalent to running a marathon every time I need to pop over to the grocery store. The e-bike battery and range runs out so fast that i’m basically limited to a single specific errand every time I go out—no option for doing more than one thing. Also add to the fact that everything is designed around cars so amenities are not blocks away, but rather towns away.
The northeastern United States sees basically every type of weather so there are days where it’s wonderful to be out on a bike and days were it is a complete nightmare—when you have to get on your bike to get to work when its raining sheets or 10 degrees (Fahrenheit) outside and there is no other option it becomes a wretched ordeal.
My point is, beyond a very specific set of circumstances where weather, health, topography, public transit infrastructure and also the immense luxury of even being able to live in a city all line up, using a bike as a primary mode of transportation is completely useless solution.
Also I am tired of minor injuries compounding year over year due to the simple fact that I am using my body as both the engine and support structure to move myself, vehicle and cargo around just to live.
I’m sorry you’re getting pushback and criticism for this. As someone who physically can’t bicycle and struggles with mobility, I strongly support well designed and well maintained walkable communities, bicycle infrastructure, and effective public transit. And I recognize that, for some people, the basic right to travel and work and generally function in society requires personal car ownership.
That doesn’t mean I sympathize much with people who live in subdivisions off major highways with no grocery stories within twenty miles - there shouldn’t be any community anywhere designed to require car ownership.
But I also don’t sympathize much with people who want to ban all personal vehicle ownership from their little 15 minute utopias. Disabled people exist.
I agree with this. Cities shouldn’t be car exclusive, but eliminating cars completely would also alienate villagers and people living in rural areas, in addition to disabled people.(written by an european who has family in those regions)
Preach it.
I am old enough where these sorts of points have much heavier weight. I can bike, but my body is not happy after any non-trivial distance.
I now have my eye on an electric recumbant trike. It solves all of my ergonomic (back) issues, and the electric would help with some of the terrain struggles and help me more accurately predict travel time. Plus, there’s a bit more storage for, e.g., a change of clothes for the destination. They’re damned expensive, though, even the cheapest.
Doesn’t solve the weather issue, but I’m sure someone makes a version that has a shell; at which point you’re essentially just driving around a small, slow, electric car with a lot of limitations.
I’m still going to replace my bike with a recumbent, though. My body just can’t handle that position for prolonged periods anymore.
