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)
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.
Removed by mod
This should include gas cars too which are ungodly inefficient
Cool, now do the same chart but instead of energy use time.
Time us is so heavily dependent on location you cant standardize the data effectively
Time efficiency in a modern urban area optimized for public transport and non-motorized transport modes compared to time efficiency in current typical urban areas, which are focused on individual motorized transport modes with severe lack of public transport:
[Fancy chart: first case left, second case right]
[Good] [Bad]
That’s nice, but in my town at least driving to work takes half the time of taking the direct bus and that’s with half the roads in the town being closed to private vehicles. To walk to work I have to walk for 2 hours without breaks down to the bridge and back up the other side or cycle for 50 minutes (at -10°C) this is compared to a 10 minute drive through the tunnel.
I genuinely wouldn’t mind taking the bus if my kids daycare was open longer.
Yeah but what about if a person is a massive hambeast? Ain’t no cycles going nowhere under that strain.
Or what if they are a massive douchenozzle chud fuckwit?!? It would emasculate them to not have the largest most unnecessary truck possible?!?
“What about the disabled / elderies / social anxiety” must be the most bad-faith argument lmao. My friend got disabled because of cars. Most car drivers are not disabled, are they? Exemption for handicapped people already exists.
Oh there’s always a genuine, non-sarcastic use for a car. I’m close enough to work to cycle without blinking, yet scheduling and family pressures / drop-offs/ pick-ups mean that it’s more time-sensible to drive.
I hate it. I used to cycle every day to work.
The other shitty thing in the equation is the public transport which functions at a generous 40% of what it might.
I’d hate to wrap my soggy brain around solving the problem, but I wish someone would; more routes, more frequency, more funding. = fewer cars.
Exactly… cars would not be that bad if they were used sparingly instead of making it a default.
Thanks a lot for linking the source!
you’re welcome. It’s something I try to do routinely.
Where’s the gas car on here? How about steam locomotive?
If I’ve got to go 300+ miles through the US I’m probably not going on foot or by human power.
Let me just travel 30km to the shops by foot and carry shopping home another 30km back again
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.
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.
I don’t live in a city.
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.
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.
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
My ebike goes 40 km/h.
Mine goes up to 35 km/h when is freshly charged, down 75% of battery to 30 km/h.
I believe most e-bikes in Europe are limited to 25km/h. 32km/h in Canada.
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.
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.
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
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.
The car is correctly represented, about 0.15 KWh / km is what one gets.
However, the positioning of the e-bike looks strange to me. I’ve looked at previous studies and the e-biker has always been first in line - because the efficiency of its motor far exceeds the efficiency of human digestion and muscles, while its weight and speed remain comparable to an ordinary cyclist.
I think someone has calculated food energy incorrectly, or assumed that e-bikes move faster than they do. :)
I think many people peddle just as hard on an electric bike, so the 5.5 kWh/km is a given, the rest is the energy required to go faster. Since air resistance increases with the square of the speed, it might very well be the case that 14 kWh/km at 25 km/h is more efficient than what the human alone would need to deliver for the same speed.
I just did a quick of my statistics. My bike typically provides an average of 100W in my hilly 28km commute (both ways) that takes about 1h15 minutes. That’s less than 5Wh/km.
I’m using a fairly high setting, too, and judging by the fact that I don’t break a sweat at all, I’m 100% sure I’m not pedaling as hard as I do on a regular bike.
I guess it’s hard to gauge an e-bike since they often have a variety of operating modes ranging from progressively higher levels of pedal assist up to full throttle. But that’s fascinating to think that an all-electric ride may actual consume less energy in the grand scheme of things. I had never looked at it that way!
It is interesting, but remember we need food to live anyway, and we need exercise to stay healthy. If we ask used ebikes on max pedal assist to get around, but then go to the gym and pound the treadmill for an hour, what does that do to the numbers? Or if we eat less and burn less energy, but then lose bone density and need more healthcare as we age (just one effect among many of not getting enough exercise)?
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.
Looks like trains are about 50wh/km
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/most-energy-efficient-mode-zero-emission-urban-transport-kmeť
I couldn’t find any info on planes, but that’d be interesting to see how massive that would be too.
It’s that normalized by passenger or is that just the train?
The 50 is normalized to passenger. I think it’s 30 per seat, but I guess they don’t fill all the seats usually.
Normalized by passenger, certainly. However, it’s easier to hit passenger capacity in a train than in a (private) car.
So if you just 4 people in an electric car then it beats a train? Huh
Wait the private car isn’t normalized as 1 person per car or 1.2 average people per car?
Deeply suspicious framing if that’s the case.
You misunderstood me. For one, I simply assumed that locomotives have big engines for a reason and thus the number can’t be calculated for the entire train. For two, when I mentioned the capacity of cars, I meant maximum passenger capacity. I said that because at maximum passenger capacity, cars become a reasonable means of transportation whereas normally, they are ridiculously inefficient.
