Comparing energy used per passenger-mile (calories), they found that a bicycle needed only 35 calories, whereas a car expended a whopping 1,860. Bus and trains fell about midway between, and walking still took 3 times as many calories as riding a bike the same distance.
Not to mention the bike and walk calories are from your lunch and not from fossil fuels. Not DIRECTLY, anyway. I suppose if you calculate in the calories needed to produce YOUR calories it wouldn't look quite as good - but it would still look better than that drive.
They also looked at a measurement called: ‘Persons per hour that one meter-width-equivalent right-of-way can carry’. In this case Rail scored tops with 4,000 persons, but ‘autos in mixed traffic’ still managed the worse rating with only 170 people. Bikes did pretty well, relative to cars, achieving 1,500 persons per hour.
Yes, I'm still here. What was supposed to be a minor rearrangement of furniture turned into an 18 hour internet outage, followed by additional rearrangement and a new wifi router. Also, the heat has sapped most of my will to write - there's no AC here at Bohemian Paradise which is very green but a bit unpleasant. At least the pole beans on the Smallest Farm like it, as they've shot up above my head.
Big weekend next weekend - Edwards in Cedar Rapids, Bayh in Iowa City - and I'm missing it. My brain is on vacation mode; I'm in a stretch where I'm only working two days out of ten.
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