235
The Most Efficient Traveler Isn’t a Bird or a Fish—It’s You on a Bike
(www.scientificamerican.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2025
235 points (98.8% liked)
Fuck Cars
13648 readers
325 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
To honestly compare the efficiency of cars you have to consider that the car might weigh 2000kg, but when it's only transporting a 100kg occupant you have to divide the efficiency by 20. Only when you're fully utilizing the vehicle to transport many passengers and cargo are you going to approach the efficiency values on the graph. All the vehicles have the same problem, they assume you're not just trying to get to the destination, but that you also want to bring your mobile living room (with couch and recliners and HVAC system and a storage locker) to the destination as well.
By comparison, walking has the full efficiency since you're transporting yourself in full to the destination.