- https://www.zianet.com/wrucker/the%20energetic%20cost%20of%2...
- https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S258884042...
The first article comes close, but is more about why bicycles are so energy efficient (due to of all things not stretching your muscles!)
Why have they animated the chart? It adds nothing, as far as I can tell.
Why all the tiny points? Is each one a data point (seems unlikely)?
Why is there only one swimmer?
Why is there a walker/runner area to the left and below swimmers? What is in that area?
Is this article just shilling for Big Velomobile? ;0)
Nothing on this chart surprises me, with the exception of salmon but that’s purely because I don’t really have any preconceptions about how efficient swimming is, beyond it feeling harder than walking in a human form.
Salmon is also a weird one to pick given their breeding method, you’d expect them to perhaps have some unusual adaptations as result of needing to swim hard upstream from time to time.
Also the fastest fish (sailfish) is similar to the fastest land animal (cheetah) at somewhere around 110kmh.
Trying to say that a dog is incredibly unefficient is misleading at best - especially when we're trying to make a statement about nature's most efficient traveller.
It's the classic physics issue - you are ignoring air resistance, but in this case you are ignoring everything other than a perfectly paved road.
Quite possibly. I would imagine it depends on the forest. I've been in forested areas on the mountain bike and you can cycle through these areas fine.
> It's the classic physics issue - you are ignoring air resistance, but in this case you are ignoring everything other than a perfectly paved road.
Rolling resistance is mainly down to the types of tyres used, how wide they are and how much they are inflated. Surface doesn't make that much of a difference IMO unless it is on a really lose surface e.g. loose gravel, mud or ice.
The biggest improvements to cycling efficiency is usually either being in a recumbent bicycle (less air resistance as you are led down) or by being in a more more Aero position with lycra on. But air resistance only becomes a big thing past 20mph or if you are wearing clothing that is really baggy.
Bicycles are the most efficient forms of transport in energy per mile. They are often the fastest in built up areas as well.
I don't disagree, but if this is the purpose of this graphic, why not just specifically measure different forms of transport in energy per mile?
This article is putting a metric of efficiency, while ignoring the reasons why things like a dog may have less efficent locomotion over perfectly flat terrain, because there are very few natural landmarks that have perfectly flat terrain.
I'd love to see a deeper comparison, how does efficiency of locomotion compare between animals within different types of environments, obstacles, etc. Otherwise this is a graphic that was used to make a point about cycling using an abstract measure rather than actual research.
> This article is putting a metric of efficiency, while ignoring the reasons why things like a dog may have less efficent locomotion over perfectly flat terrain, because there are very few natural landmarks that have perfectly flat terrain.
You can't control for this stuff and measure it really.
> I'd love to see a deeper comparison, how does efficiency of locomotion compare between animals within different types of environments, obstacles, etc.
Again this is difficult to control for. Other than particular areas where bicycle won't work (and there are very few places where that would apply), the bicycle is still likely to win out. Even if you have to get off occasionally to navigate over/under/around an obstacle you get all the benefits of efficiency for the majority of the time.
Don't overthink it.
an average rat typically weighs less than 1 pound, while an average salmon weighs several pounds.
Do you live somewhere that game fish are particularly small, or rats are particularly large, or have you never been fishing?
The numbers I saw would be dramatically higher if sampling in freefall. Methodologies aim to average out those effects. It's easy enough to lie with disingenuous comparisons. It just doesn't make sense that something that needs to spin large rotors at supersonic speeds is more efficient than something that spins much smaller rotors.
How much energy is it going to take a human to cross 40000 km (circumnavigate the Earth)? A human on a jet will require around 2 tons of fuel and around 40 hours of time (fuel economy of about 4L per 100km of flight).
A human on a bicycle will roughly take about a year of travel (assuming a fairly reasonable 150km a day). In other words, about 1/50-th of a productive human life needlessly wasted that could have been used to improve the world.
Carbon footprint in the US is about 20 tons per year per person, so that's another way to look at a year of missed opportunity that you would spend by cycling instead of flying.
This aspect is almost completely ignored when people talk about bikes or public transit. Yes, they are efficient, but their efficiency comes at a cost of several wasted lifetimes of time every day for a large city.
That's it, that's the whole story. Adding calories for the "other stuff" that happens while travel is occurring is not part of the story.
If the chart is already a mish mash of numbers with someone's subjective opinions of the sort you mention then it's useless.
And the most efficient way overall? Working from home in suburbs that don't have transit.
If you live in apartment instead of detached house - even your AC/heating gets smaller because you get less external surface area per person.
Getting this wrong and thinking living in a city uses more resources per Capita shows some serious biases.
Or, you know, just appreciate this 2D chart for the two dimensions of factual information it is able to convey effectively.