I’ve been reading a lot from folks like Brett (
zentriathlon.com) who are really promoting cycling to work a few days each week, leaving a set of clothes and then driving in to pick up those nasty clothes all at one time. Now I have cycled from my place in Scarsdale to Madison and 42nd Street, which is where I work in Manhattan, but have been stymied by the lack of support our building managers give to cyclists. There is no place to shower and their response to a safe place to store my bicycle is to leave it locked up outside on the streets of Manhattan. No one will steal it they say. A friend of mine decided to test this theory with a folding bike called the
tikit and she too found that bringing a bicycle into our building – even a folding one – is completely unacceptable behavior. You can see her video here below.
Realize that this goes all the way back to when I started working in corporate America, when we were provided subsidies to carpool or to take public transportation in Los Angeles, but when I told them I’d rather ride my bike or run from the westside to work and back, I was considered inelligible for those same subsidies. Back then I was young and trusting and figured that rules and policies were made by people much smarter than I am and there had to be a lot of thought into why it couldn’t work that way or they would have already figured it out. Now we all know better and Policy without Purpose is almost a mantra in corporate America and even more so in the public sector, hence the term public policy is usually right up there with military intelligence when example of oxymorons are thrown out.
Thinking, however, that a more thoughtful appeal might be met with some degree of constructive discourse, I went searching for a more compelling value proposition. In doing so, I came across the article below, which calculates the miles per gallon of the average cyclist at 912 miles per gallon. Now how can anyone argue with numbers like that? We all know that driving faster burns more fuel and this premise holds true for cyclists as well, but even the fastest Tour riders will burn a staggering 300 miles to the gallon. I think that says it all. Enjoy the article below from
How stuff works, reprinted and published without any explicit or implied permission to do so. Enjoy!
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It turns out that “biological engines” — which is what the muscles in your body are — are pretty amazing in terms of efficiency. To find out how efficient, let’s look at how many calories a person burns while riding a bicycle.
If you look at a page like this calorie chart, you will find that a person riding a bicycle at 15 miles per hour (24 km per hour) burns 0.049 calories per pound per minute. So a 175-pound (77-kg) person burns 515 calories in an hour, or about 34 calories per mile (about 21 calories per km).
A gallon of gasoline (about 4 liters) contains about 31,000 calories. If a person could drink gasoline, then a person could ride about 912 miles on a gallon of gas (about 360 km per liter). Considering that a normal car gets about 30 miles per gallon, that’s pretty impressive!
To be fair, keep in mind that a car generally weighs a ton or more, while a bicycle weighs only 30 pounds. Cars also travel a lot faster than 15 mph. But it is still an interesting comparison. Note also that people cannot drink gasoline. However, people can drink vegetable oil, which contains nearly the same number of calories per gallon (if you look at How Fats Work you can see that fat contains long hydrogen/carbon chains just like gasoline does).
The people riding in a race like the Tour de France are riding more like 25 mph. Because air resistance rises very quickly with speed, they are burning about three times more calories — something like 100 calories per mile. In a 100-mile stage of the tour, a racer might burn something like 8,000 to 10,000 calories in one day! So they are getting only about 300 miles per gallon. The only way to replace those calories is to eat a lot of food
