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this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2023
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Why the fuck do people hate on the one class of people using the most efficient form of transportation that also provides exercise in a world that can't stop spewing greenhouse gasses (For electric cars, those greenhouse gasses are being spewed at the power plant instead of from the car itself) and people don't get enough exercise?
Fucking. Madness. Cyclists should be applauded and not targeted.
I agree with you about cyclists but this is conservative misinformation that's been debunked in a thousand different ways so I'd appreciate if you'd stop spreading it.
I'd like to see the information debunking this. In my area, 89% of power is from fossil fuels. My naive understanding of this is that this will still generate emissions, although I would expect the capabilities of reducing harmful emissions to be much better at a power plant instead of having to build it into every vehicle. So my thinking is that emissions are still happening, just not necessarily where people are living and with better emissions management.
Damn, the parent comment to mine got deleted, so nobody will see this anyway.
You don't really need sources for this, just apply some basic sense.
Yes, that is part of it.
Here are some other cliffnotes:
Even when using 100% coal, you're still producing far less CO2 than an equivalent gasoline vehicle.
Gasoline only comes from one place: Extracted and refined dinosaur carcasses. Electricity can come from wind, solar, nuclear, etc. Personally mine is 100% wind energy.
Gasoline is transported by gasoline-burning vehicles. Electricity is transported over wires, further reducing CO2 emitted from transportation.
I mean we can go down a big rabbit hole about the environmental costs but the EV always wins out, if not instantly.
Bikes and ebikes (or even just walking) are obviously going to produce a crapton less CO2 than either.
I don't know about other cities, but locally we have a very nice and well paved city-spanning network of bicycle paths that are parallel to, but separate from, the city streets. And we have a group of guys on their $10k bikes who ignore these paths to ride three across in a lane during rush hour on roads that will beat their wheels square, ignoring all red lights and stop signs. They make it hard for me to ride, because I get associated with these people by virtue of riding a bike.
People don't hate cyclists. They hate those cyclists.
This is of course excluding those who hate everything which isn't horrible for the planet. They hate bikes, electric cars, smaller cars that don't burn much gas, vegetables, and any woman with a spine.
Most efficient?
Human bodies are god awful at converting fuel to useful mechanical energy.
I’m pretty sure they meant most efficient in terms of emissions, not energy conversion. Even if you count farting as emissions, bikes put out basically no emissions. You’d have to get 100% of your electricity from renewables to match them in an electric car.
That's not because they're efficient, it's because they use almost no energy in the first place.
Poor energy conversion means more emissions. 🤦♂️
Are you honestly going to tell me that you think a person riding a bicycle produces more emissions than a person driving a car?
I'm sure that would be relevant if my body was attempting to push an entire car to work every day. When I cycle to work, I'm carrying at most 15 kilos of bike and belongings with me. With the efficiency multiplier of gears and wheels, I believe my 8 kilometer trip burns about 200 kilocalories. I don't think that much energy will move an entire 2000 kilo car very far at all, whether it's powered with electricity or petrol.
And how much food does that require you to ingest? What did it take to produce that food, deliver it to you, and take it away when you shat it out?
So easy to ignore all the inbound energy that was utilized for your body to produce 2kc.
200 kcals is like 1/10 of the average person's daily intake, so maybe 1/3 of an average meal? Not much at all, comparatively. If you're still concerned about efficiency, slap a small electric motor on the bike, but even a fully human-powered bike is more energy efficient than driving an entire car.
I'll give you an honest answer. I live in a rualish area. There's a 2 lane highway that's roughly 50 miles from my city to another one. 55 and a lot of blind curves. Farmers in semi trucks use that road all the time for hauling stuff.
Every summer there's a pack of cyclists that try that route. They barely do 25. Every summer one of them does on one of the corners. You simply can't stop a semi fast enough when something is doing half the speed limit, especially on a sharp corner.
They're a fucking menace. There literally hundreds of miles of trails to ride in my area, but they have to be on that one particular road. They're simply the most self centered assholes in the universe IMO.
That sounds like a problem with your county. If that many people are dying, wouldn’t it be worth building a separated bike path?
We have one...they don't use it.
How does that make absolutely any sense?
"I couldn't stop fast enough because they were going too slow!"
More like you're following far too closely.
What part of 55 and blind curve do you not understand?
You realize 55 is the maximum speed, right? It doesn't mean you have to continue driving 55MPH over corpses.
You might want to look up the stopping distance of a semi at 55.