I got the chance to ride in a pretty large and fast formation during an otherwise casual charity ride a few years back. Really enjoyable and a bit nerve wracking at the same time being in close quarters like that. When in the middle of the pack, it was pretty amazing how little energy it took to maintain speed--just a few half-hearted pedal strokes every few seconds. Any more and you'd start creeping up on the rear tire of the person in front of you.
edit: Forgot the best part. The formation ended when someone near the front swerved to avoid a hole in the trail. Person behind them--taken by surprise--abruptly braked. Chaos ensued. Chaos propagated upstream and eventually got to me. I ran over a downed bike and flew over my own bike landing on my handle bars--broke a rib (though didn't know it until a few days later). Why would the organizers of a casual charity ride allow formation riding, you ask? They don't.
Although I'm a marathon runner, I've dabbled in speed cycling many times, and rode in a "pro" peloton (amateur pro) for a while.
There are a couple of rules you end up learning.
1. When you're leading a peloton, never go aero (when you lower your upper body so you're "cutting the wind"). Always keep your eyes on the road ahead, looking for potholes.
2. Whenever you spot a pothole, call it. Shout "pothole", loud and clear. As you go around it, point to it for the person behind you.
3. When someone in front of you shouts "pothole" and points to it, shout "pothole" and point to it, recursively.
4. Never break abruptly in the middle of a peloton.
5. For maximum efficiency and safety, your front wheel should a wheel's distance from the rear wheel of the bike in front of you.
6. If you need to do anything that is somewhat abrupt, like leaving the peloton, always warn, loud and clear.
Couple of comments from someone who trained with professional cyclists for some years, and even won a few (amateur) bike races:
> When you're leading a peloton, never go aero (when you lower your upper body so you're "cutting the wind"). Always keep your eyes on the road ahead, looking for potholes.
You can do both, with flexibility and core strength. If I'm on the front in a road race, I'll be in the drops. My breakaway performance improved dramatically when I started including yoga & pilates in training regime.
However, for time-trial or triathlon bikes, i.e. those with specialist aero bars that help us become more narrow to the wind, you'll hear general advice to never get down on the aero bars in a group. That certainly is a good safety guideline to follow, with the exception of training for/racing a team time trial. Not so much due to visibility as it is the altered handling characteristics and lack of brake levers.
> For maximum efficiency and safety, your front wheel should a wheel's distance from the rear wheel of the bike in front of you.
That's a lot. In a competitive event we're often down to a few centimeters gap between wheels. In such circumstances the proper safety protocol is to be slightly laterally displaced from the wheel you're following, enough that any unanticipated change in speed means your front wheel slides past their rear wheel rather than making tyre contact. The choice of left or right generally depends on wind direction, and on very windy days this coordinates with echelon formation.
I mean, as I said, those were some rules I learned while training. I never really raced, so I don't know how those apply in that situation.
I should've given some more context. I'm from a South American country, we used to train in a road that goes around a fairly big park, so it makes a +- 3km rectangular lap. We rode on the lane closest to the sidewalk, so we could pretty ride past the traffic lights.
It's a pretty busy road during the day, but during "training hours" (19:00), there's less traffic. Still a lot of cars, and there's a bus stop along the way, and not every bus driver respects cyclists (they'll overtake you, then stop in front of you). There's a particular section where there's a major road that merges within our lap, and there's almost no working public lights, and the road is full of potholes, and there's a broken pipe somewhere, so the potholes are always full of water.
So yeah. If you're riding in a fairly big peloton, NEVER go aero. It can literally kill you. I've seen it happen.
> Couple of comments from someone who trained with professional cyclists for some years, and even won a few (amateur) bike races:
Same here, although I only won a couple of very minor races
> > When you're leading a peloton, never go aero (when you lower your upper body so you're "cutting the wind"). Always keep your eyes on the road ahead, looking for potholes.
> You can do both, with flexibility and core strength. If I'm on the front in a road race, I'll be in the drops. My breakaway performance improved dramatically when I started including yoga & pilates in training regime.
Yes, it obviously depends on the speed the group is going, but the front of the peloton will always go into a more aero position when riding fast.
> However, for time-trial or triathlon bikes, i.e. those with specialist aero bars that help us become more narrow to the wind, you'll hear general advice to never get down on the aero bars in a group. That certainly is a good safety guideline to follow, with the exception of training for/racing a team time trial. Not so much due to visibility as it is the altered handling characteristics and lack of brake levers.
I know several group rides who would not let people with tribars (typically only triathlete would try) into the group. You'd likely get pretty aggressively get told to f off (hanging of the back might be tolerated). As you point out there are pretty good reasons for it.
> > For maximum efficiency and safety, your front wheel should a wheel's distance from the rear wheel of the bike in front of you.
> That's a lot. In a competitive event we're often down to a few centimeters gap between wheels. In such circumstances the proper safety protocol is to be slightly laterally displaced from the wheel you're following, enough that any unanticipated change in speed means your front wheel slides past their rear wheel rather than making tyre contact. The choice of left or right generally depends on wind direction, and on very windy days this coordinates with echelon formation.
Again full agreement. Living a large gap in a peloton or pace line is again a pretty good way of getting a "talking to" (more or less aggressive depending on the group and the speed). One should also point out that if it came to a touch of wheels it is largely considered the fault of the person in front.
Finally and that is something many beginners get wrong. If you're riding two abreast (large group training rides will often ride like that), you should have your handlebars next to each other. Imyou can then ride very close (handlebars can touch) without danger, because if one needs to come very close you just lean into each other. The dangerous situation is when handlebars are staggered because you can slot into the bar of the other person. They then try to move away from you (shouldn't but often happens) and you both fall.
I just had a wholesome and hearty laugh at the last two sentences. Thank you for that. And sorry for your broken rib. I broke mine the same way but only after being love-tapped by an SUV. I didn’t realize it until the next day.
Semi tangential, but a friend of mine hit a parked car on a bicycle, thought nothing of it went home, ate a pot of paella and then went to sleep.
Woke up in excruciating pain, went to hospital and nearly died.
Turned out he'd perforated his colon extremely badly, and you only find out those sorts of injuries if your digestive system starts operating, pumping your last meal into your body.
They had to remove all the muck out of his body, and then he spent a few months on fluids and losing a lot of weight.
I guess the lesson is, cycling injuries are often the type of body injuries that take some time to identify. Keep an eye out.
Stepdad is a retired firefighter, and has seen some pretty scarring stuff.
One of the stories he shared was that he got to a car crash, woman had been t-boned at about 30MPH but was fully alert, able to move extremities, and according to stepdad, seemed like a bumps and bruises case.
They still load her up to take her to the hospital and a few minutes into the ambulance ride her vitals spike and she’s dead within a few minutes before they make it to the ER.
Turns out a broken rib had split open one of her organs but nobody had the slightest clue until it was too late (although it didn’t seem like there was much they could have done anyways).
It doesn’t always take much. I know someone elderly who survived tearing off their hepatic artery after falling. It turns out you don’t need it, so if you survive the blood loss you’ll be fine. The big pot belly from the blood takes some time to resolve.
I'd day the future of locomotion is to connect the bikes together with rigid links and put them in line. But there is still the problem of potholes. But that can be avoided by replacing roads which have to be redone every year by something like tracks, then you don't even have to worry about direction and self-driving becomes easy.
Sounds familiar to you ?
I even would that there is personal convenience to personal vehicles. And nothing wrong with personal convenience but it's also true that some modern conveniences have a rather high cost in terms of negative externalities that I doubt we can afford any longer on this planet (yes I am looking at you, cars) while others not as much.
I am not saying that from a moral standpoint, I really like personal convenience but I don't like it so much when other people lives are made miserable to support for my personal convenience. And I'd like to think that solutions that work for the collective can be optimized to be made more convenient for everyone.
I said it a few times before, but the advent of self-driving bikes is the earliest I'm going to ever ride a self-driving car. If the tech is good enough to balance all the forces that are at work when riding a bike in real time, and without adding 100kg to the weight of a bike, it'll be definitely good enough to drive a car.
Self-driving is more about looking at the situation in front of you, assessing risks and deciding where to steer/accelerate/brake. Vehicle dynamics aren't really part of the equation (other than as performance limits).
You mentioned it was on a trail; normally you'd only have a peloton on a paved road where the event organizers had checked the surfaces beforehand. You get some fairly close formation riding in (road) club runs as well, but riders are typically less closely bunched together, subject to conditions, experience and the level of competitiveness that morning.
Yeah, I chose to use “formation” rather than “peloton” because the latter would have been a stretch. It was two long, closely packed columns. It definitely was ill-advised and ended exactly how it should have.
> The worst part is apparently I won’t know when I do!
You know you've broken a rib when the pain from the injury gets worse and worse over time, rather than less and less. 3 days of pain in your rib getting progressively worse? Time to head to the hospital
What can be done at the hospital? Where we are there’s not great access to healthcare and reading online suggests nothing can be done for most rib injuries anyway. She’s reluctant to put the effort into getting care if there won’t be a meaningful outcome.
A broken rib can damage your lungs or liver. Not sure where in the world you are, but going to the hospital with pain usually can help with at least getting prescription pain-killers, especially useful because having a broken rib tends to be kind of painful, paracetamol/ibuprofen have not helped me in the past with broken ribs.
Last time I went they warned me of not being able to breath deeply enough, hence I got stronger pain-killers. Something about possible infections or something like that, was a while ago.
That makes sense, thanks. My wife did have lung issues for a week or so but they ended up mellowing out and fading away. Weird stuff like coughing up infected phlegm. Definitely shallow breath like you mentioned.
We’re in Canada but our healthcare situation in our area is pretty bad. Sometimes weeks to get an appointment, walk in clinics are loaded by the early morning, triage in emergency rooms can totally exclude problems like my wife’s within any reasonable time frame. I think some parts of the country are okay right now (I hope) but we haven’t had a family doctor or reliable access to healthcare for years now.
Depends how you are measuring efficiency really. If the goal is to get exercise it is pretty efficient. More efficient than using a chairlift to ski :-). And about the same as a bike race that is a circuit.
> It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal
This seems highly questionable. I would hazard a guess for example that cargo ships are significantly more energy efficient per gram per kilometer.
Edit: indeed my intuition was right, going by Wikipedia. Domestic waterborn and rail can transport a metric ton (i.e. 1000 kg) of freight 4-6 km using 1 MJ of energy. By contrast, a velomobile can transport a person ~12 km using 1 MJ of energy, but a person weights only about 70 kg.
Thanks yeah. Even ignoring the claim that it's the most efficient per mass, even on a per passenger basis there appear to be modern rail lines that beat velomobiles (let alone bicycles) for energy expenditure per passenger-mile.
I think this is getting into somewhat nitpick territory. If we include per passenger we could just use bikes with 10 riders (extreme tandems). On a flat road the increase of energy for more people is very minor so you can just divide by the number of people.
Well I was very excited to learn about velomobiles and then very disappointed to learn how much I'd have to pay and how hard it would be to get my hands on one.
Moving over a solid in air vs moving a boat through water already involves talking about movement through media with vastly different coefficients of friction, so comparing them isn't really "fair". After all, if I'm in space, I can move nearly infinite miles with the only energy needed being that which got me started going in the first place.
I choose "distance to Voyager 1" as my frame of reference: according to NASA's status website I've traveled about one thousand miles since I started writing this sentence. After such an effort it's clearly time for a coffee break!
The question is if one should include cargo transport into that equation. I think that becomes a very different question. I mean I think it's pretty obvious that the statement is meant in the context of moving oneself around, not stacking 100 people into a container. .
A statement that chooses to say "per gram" rather than "per person" sounds like it's intentionally about cargo, and not people.
Also, riding a bicycle (even while coasting and not expending energy) is not exactly comfortable, so stacking people into a container might not be all that unreasonable a comparison.
If we speak of individual transport that means: bicycles or public transport. Which is precisely what we know should be done for 30+ years to tackle the climate crisis
Ah the good old "there is no perfect solution, so we shouldn't even start trying"-argument. Perfect for when you already decided you don't want to fix an issue and you want to end an discussion without putting in the mental legwork.
You might want to consider that there is actual value in searching solutions that still allow people to maintain their mobility, while reducing the negative impact on everything.
Ships typically travel slower and have flatter terrain (which matters since regenerative braking on trains is not 100% efficient). Turns out both freight trains and cargo ships are in the same ballpark though, so efficiency probably depends more on specific route and model.
Considering cycling vs walking only, I always thought this depends heavily on how steep the terrain is. So cycling is more efficient than walking on a flat road without headwind (which feels intuitive: give half a stroke on the pedal and you're moving several meters forward, whereas for walking you need several steps moreover you're essentially moving your complete body weight up by a couple of centimeters on every step). But uphill that's just completely different, wfor cycling having one major muscle group which needs to develop quite a lot of power. tldr; statement indeed needs some clarification.
I can see why they guard the form of the bikes used.
Competitive team road cycling is, amongst other things, about the tactics of multiple riders using shared aerodynamic advantage.
If you make everyone more aero by say using recumbent bikes you diminish the advantage of teamwork.
You’d lose all the inter-team horse trading that goes on between rivals in breakaways or mountain stages. No more tight sprint train finishes.
There’d be no surprise attacks because there’d be no way to conserve energy hiding behind a rival waiting for the right moment.
Everything would be full gas all the time and could mostly be settled by looking at pure power numbers.
You’d still get a race but every stage would be a simple time trial. Effectively road racing would become a very different discipline.
Like giving all the riders ebikes. It’s still a form of racing but you lose a big part of what makes a team stage racing compelling.
I’ve always wondered though why they couldn’t allow open vehicle stages for some time trials where the riders are on their own anyway. I think that would preserve team cycling and still be fun.
Well, this is not about UCI regulations, it is about what is physically most efficient. But indeed, it is a pity that the UCI blocks any new bicycle designs.
Their goal is to keep race bicycles close to bicycles used by normal people. They don't want to end up with Formula 1 or Indycar cars vs the car we use to go to the mall. Both have 4 wheels but that's it.
However there are competitions for non UCI bicycles. The speed world records are among them.
Although F1 & IndyCar both ban performance-enhancing technologies that every single road-going car is required to have, specifically ABS & traction control. They are a weird mix of extremely cutting edge & expensive and also intentionally outdated & bad technology.
And before someone jumps in about how those technologies are actually somehow bad for the track or race car drivers don't benefit from them, F1 actually had to give up their 1994 ban because every team was doing it anyway and the FIA couldn't adequately police it until the ECU itself was made standard in 2008: https://racingnews365.com/traction-control-in-f1-a-short-his...
I understand and I agree on the somewhat archaic technologies. My point is that a Formula 1 car doesn't look like a car whilst a pro's bicycle looks like a very polished sport bicycle you can buy for 500 Euro or less. Every single component makes a world of difference though.
That is kind of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Bikes used by normal people look a lot because of what the UCI is mandating. If e.g. recumbent bikes were an option in at least some competitions, they would be much more common place, the same applies for velomobiles.
Nevertheless, there are a lot of normal people driving recumbent bikes and velomobiles already. The road I live in is part of a bike route and I can see both driving here regularly (I also happen to own a recumbent bike :) )
I never saw many of them even on bike routes but we're probably from different parts of the world. Velomobiles, maybe I never daw one of them, only on YouTube.
As the owner of a recumbent, how does it handle on dirt and gravel? Are they bitumen only?
UCI rules only govern certain types of bicycle races. Triathlon bike rules are much looser and allow unconventional frame geometries. However, they still ban velomobiles, partly for safety and partly to keep equipment costs from spiraling out of reach.
I doubt it. Pushing water out of the way is never very efficient. A sailboat appears to be efficient because it is harvesting wind power and not counting that.
You would be surprised. I was always astounded by how easy it was to push my friends’ sailboat by hand. With them and their gear on board that boat was around three metric tons.
There's no breakout friction with a boat. This means you can move enormous weight with just steady pressure. It doesn't really have anything to do with efficiency.
Reminds me of Alan Watts - the way is to go with the flow. Instead of building a motor, hoist a sail. Instead of sending a rocket, build a telescope. Etc.
That is very cool, but for a slightly off-topic consideration: I don't think I would want to travel at 60 km/h on a public road with nothing but an ultralight shell protecting me.
(Yes, I know bikers go much faster with even less protection - I'm not a fan of motorbikes either.)
Just because you can doesn't mean you have to. You can do 25-30 and put in 40W + whatever gravitational energy you need to gain (which will slow you down a lot on the hills).
But really, anything as efficient as an upright or more is fine.
One of the more efficient velomobiles that can be practical as a daily driver (ie. comfortable, has suspension, still efficient when open top so you don't broil in summer, you don't need someone to catch it when you stop).
There’s YouTube videos of a guy who, on a downhill stretch, gets on his tummy and is like a rigid dart flying through the air, overtaking everyone at a ridiculous speed.
I was always curious if it was real and why not everyone does it.
It is real! It's an extremely aerodynamic position.
> and why not everyone does it.
In races, it isn't a race legal position to use. In practice, it is a very unstable position and you can't race in it so there's not much point to taking the risk. UCI is notorious for being very strict about that sort of thing (even as so far as to ban sitting on the top tube or resting your forearms on the handlebars) and they change the rules regularly to get rid of anything they feel is too risky.
The last ones are unsafe. Regulating sock height I do not get it, maybe they had to do it to prevent the cyclists from using ridiculous knee high socks.
Anyway, roads bikes are pretty efficient even without a peloton. On roads. I've recently built a vintage road bike and only managed to burn 350 kcal on an 1 hr, 18 km ride. Most of it was in HR zone 2, easy. Almost flat, but still. Imagine what a velomobile could do.
> Regulating sock height I do not get it, maybe they had to do it to prevent the cyclists from using ridiculous knee high socks.
Yeah this rule was ostensibly designed to prevent everyone from racing in knee-high, very tight compression socks. Shortly before this rule went in place some teams had found they had a subtle aero benefit by reducing profile and were planning to race in them. However, you get hotter.
I think we've been holding back so many bike records by requiring an upright posture. Recumbent bikes, especially ones with aero shells, would smash a great many bicycle records if they were allowed to compete. It's not even against the spirit of the competition. We allow all sorts of crazy composite carbon fiber frames with specialized drivetrains, but don't allow people to change their seating position.
The human-powered landspeed record was set in a recumbent bike. It was around 145km/hr. I think, for better or worse, the rules keep cycling an interesting sport. For example, if the tour de france allowed recumbent bikes the course would need to change massively to support anywhere near that speed safely. Crashes become far more deadly. Technology becomes far more critical than race strategy and individual rider performance. Races would be won on the flats instead of the hills. I think it'd be a less interesting sport altogether.
Triathlon is a good example of how small rule changes can drastically change the dynamics of a race. They relax a lot of the UCI rules such as by allowing aerobars, but as a result you can't safely allow drafting, and the bike component of the races become far more spread out than a cycling race would be with a lot less importance laying on attacking or defending a position and group strategy becomes nonexistent. Some of that is due to the fact that there's still a run to go afterwards, but I'm pretty sure the average person would find the bike component of a triathlon less interesting than a cycling race to watch.
For those who want it, as PaulDavisThe1st mentioned, we have stuff like TT races, recumbent TT races, velo, etc. There's a lot of options in cycling depending on the niche you like.
Most triathlons ban drafting not just for safety, but because it's supposed to be an individual effort. Organizers don't want races to turn into farces where some athletes show up with pacers who drag them into the lead.
Some short course triathlons do allow drafting (including the Olympics), but those events also ban extended aero bars for safety. Athletes who compete in those events specifically practice riding in a peloton and know how to hold their lines in order to prevent crashes.
> For example, if the tour de france allowed recumbent bikes the course would need to change massively to support anywhere near that speed safely.
Not just for speed, but recumbents are terrible at cornering and are terrible for going uphill. Half the fun in large cycling races are the mountain stages where people go slowly uphill and then really fast and technical on downhills with many corners taken at high speeds. Recumbents would be terrible for that.
> Races would be won on the flats instead of the hills.
I don’t know much about recumbent bikes.
Why is this statement true?
It seems to me that hills are still tough for recumbent bikes. Are efficient flats riders (maybe sprinters?) able to make up that much time over climbers in the flats?
With upright bikes, a race on flat terrain is much like a racing game with incredibly overly aggressive rubberband ai. If you're in the lead you have to work twice as hard as the person behind you, so you don't actually want to pull ahead until the very end. On hills this is much less true, as you're going slower and wind resistance is less of a factor.
A recumbent bike greatly reduces wind resistance and makes it so that the person in second does 10% less work rather than 50% (numbers are made up). It's not that hills are easier, but that pulling ahead on flats would actually be viable.
I have no desire to support the UCI, but I need to add that the main reason for not allowing e.g. faired recumbents in races is the reduction in awareness that comes with the change in position (and being enclosed). Although crashes do happen in races held under UCI rules, in generals cyclists all being seated at about the same height and in the same general position heightens everybody's awareness when the peloton is moving fast and tight, and makes crashes somewhat less likely. Same sort of reason that prevents the use of full-length aero-bars in events where pelotons or just regular pace lines may form.
If you want mass-start races where riders can agglomerate to reduce required power, then you're probably stuck with rules that make the bikes all much more alike than they are different.
If you want bicycle innovation, you have to go to time trial or endurance events, where drafting isn't a thing and thus the equipment could be anything.
It would probably be banned under the same rule as descending on the top tube and the puppy paws position.
I wouldn’t be at all surprised if that rigid position was really fast though.
If I put the dropper post down on my mountain bike and get low when I am on a road hill I drop like a stone. I’ve often overtaken friends on road bikes doing that.
Matej Mohorič used a dropper post to win Milan-San Remo this year.
I could see them becoming a key aero tool on road bikes in future.
It's real, we don't do it because you can't dodge stones or dogs attached to leashes that dash across the lane faster than an iphone can jump back into the owner's pocket.
Not sure about the specific video, but it can be done[0]. It is extremely dangerous of course, which I guess is why most people don't try to do it. It may also even be against regulations.
The guy is on a fixie. Likely got to an RPM point on the downhill where it was actually safer to pull his feet off the pedals.
This isn't really as unsafe as it looks... or at least not any more dangerous than keeping their feet on the pedals at that speed.
I spent a lot of time riding around velodromes... you only forget to stop peddling once on a fixie. It is like riding a bucking horse. Perfect example:
I’ve seen it and think it’s fake. He has a motor hidden in his seat tube. You can tell bc his pedals keep spinning rapidly. A well maintained bike shouldn’t keep spinning like that, but if you have a “motor doping” setup that sends power to the pedals through the bottom bracket they will.
there are automated peloton machines that do synchronized braking, cooperative load and force distribution, etc. and when on a specialized roadway there is very little risk of disruption or crash.
I get that this is sarcasm, but one of my idle day dreams is a safe, simple, mostly analog system that does exactly this between a set of moving train cars and the last car on the rear (as a transitional state, the rear car eventually catches up and mechanically couples). I call it the reverse slip carriage. If it can be done, it would keep all the advantages of trains while also totally revolutionising possible service patterns. You could (for example) have a train where every carriage slips-off to make its own subset of limited stops and then slip-joins the next train to pass by. Passengers pick where to wait on the platform based on their destination, and there's always an express carriage to where you want to go. Another neat service trick this system could do is to have an 8 car subway which runs every 5 min that splits itself into 4 different 2-car light rail services every 5 min (rather than 4 subway branches with an 8 car train every 20 min (looking at Rockaway beach A train)). The ability to split and rejoin trains on the fly without stopping or spending time on coupling procedures is simple yet it would be profoundly game changing.
My current vision for the system basically amounts to electrically coupling the motors of the carriages such that any attempt to accelerate / decelerate one carriage transfers energy via induced voltage which accelerates / decelerates the other carriages by exactly the right amount. It's like an electrical version of how all the cable cars are holding on to the same rope. No computer, no glitches, entirely dumb components.
Others have pointed out driverless metro is already a thing in some places (from memory Singapore MTR, Sydney Metro, Docklands light rail in London, airtrain at JFK airport (NYC), Vancouver SkyTrain). But let's say for regulatory reasons you need a driver. So the way this would work is the electric motors in both the driver operated train and the slip carriage are electrically coupled via the rails. Technically the one driver is operating two trains with a single controller, but the circuitry is set up in a way that the second the slip carriage is always responding to the controls identically to the main carriage +a few m/s until it gets close enough for mechanical coupling. So the driver has no mental overhead in managing the secondary train sets. From a transfer of momentum perspective, his train behaves as if the slip carriages are already mechanically part of his train.
For the sake of example, I'll focus on my second use case. A mainline heavy rail that branches into multiple light rail at the same service frequency. In this case, the carriages split off from an 8 car set into two car sets and coast to a stop at designated branch station (like old fashion slip carriages from the late 1800s). At those stations new drivers board to take over light-rail style operation. When the drivers complete the route they step off the train at which point the automatic reverse slip carriage system rejoins them into an 8 car train (one driver stays on to become the lead carriage). The drivers that stepped off then cross the platform to take over control of the next train to split itself.
A strange but doable logistic coreography that lets metro lines branch more without intolerable service frequency.
In principle, railways would not be difficult to automate. But it hasn't happened at scale yet because industry regulations require that trains be manned, and railroad unions would strenuously object to any suggestion that this be changed (since it would likely put a lot of conductors out of their jobs).
Some public transport systems have omitted the driver, but they still need a human attendant for safety to make sure that no passenger is stuck in the doors before departure (and other exceptions to smooth operation). One that I've ridden is Docklands Light Railway (DLR) in London.
I'd say it depends on the group, if you have a group of riders that know each other and have ridden in packs before then the risk of issues are slim. Essentially just stuff that probably would have given you trouble riding alone anyway.
The risk starts when you either have a race going on or you have riders that are inexperienced and don't know the customs/procedures.
Yep. It’s definitely something you want to train for.
It’s one of the main reasons to join a bike club.
A good group will call out obstacles in the road and say when the are going to slow down. They’ll have set procedures to move the group round when the riders at the front get tired.
The experience of being pulled along faster than you could ride on your own is a truely joyous experience! :D
> The experience of being pulled along faster than you could ride on your own is a truely joyous experience!
It truly is! As a kid we used to hide behind the double decker busses on our mountain bikes at the stop and accelerate with it when it got going again. We’d be riding only a few feet from the rear of the bus and it’d pull us up the big hill home so fast. The bus driver used to get really annoyed and eventually snitched to the school so we had an assembly about it !
Haha! I remember latching onto school buses and other large vehicles at stoplights when I was younger. Stay close enough, and you could get sucked along at incredible speeds. It was interesting how some drivers would get super-pissed, while others would think "hey, that's awesome!" and help you stay attached.
Riding in a pack is a whole different experience, though. You have to be hyper-aware and -predictable in your lines, but the feeling of cruising along at over 20 MPH on a flat, aided only by your fellow cyclists, is something special.
the air resistance savings in a paceline are absolutely insane to experience. Even with just one riding partner, we can go significantly farther on a ride.
Personally i average 25-27kmh. With a friend or two 32-37, in a bunch 40+kmh, easy.
* It's just such a shame that a group >3 of cyclists turn into such a selfish bunch of self-entitled twats, i avoid them like the vermin they are. I average 100-350km+ a week or ride before anyone gets too upset at that uncalled-for statement :-)
Oh, and i can recommend the website intervals.icu - amazing cycling-analytic tech on display.
I cycled the UK coast to coast with friends. We did a peleton on a boring straight cycle track that went on for many miles. We managed to do 20mph for a couple of hours with each of us taking a turn at the front for 5 minutes a time.
I've also done track cycling where you leave a 30cm gap between wheels and have no brakes. That is truly unnerving.
“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.
What about uphill or uneven terrain. going downhill on bike is very efficient too. You can test this by rolling a ball down even a slight grade. Yes, in artificial conditions bikes are better.
Fun/grim fact that's related to your question about terrain:
In world war 2 the Japanese army used bicycles to invade Malaysia and modern Singapore and it was highly effective. It allowed them to continuously advance faster than retreating British forces on foot and vehicle. The key point being it was more viable to put thousands of troops on bicycles than to put them all on vehicles that could go through rugged terrain and jungle.
Under normal conditions, retreating armies move faster than their pursuers because the invaders are slowed down by destroyed infrastructure such as blown-up bridges or obstructed roads. But this time, Japanese soldiers on light bicycles were able to use narrow roads, hidden paths and improvised log bridges. Even when bridges were missing, soldiers waded across the rivers carrying their bicycles on their shoulders.
The bicycles also proved to be an excellent help in the transportation of equipment. While the British soldiers carried up to 18 kilograms while marching through the jungle, their Japanese enemies could carry twice as much, benefiting from the distribution of weight onto two wheels. “Even the long-legged Englishmen could not escape our bicycles”, remembered Colonel Masanobu Tsuji.
The study is good, with the possible exception of using stationary (terra-cotta) riders in the wind tunnel. It seems possible that moving riders would create turbulence that would change the equation.
Yes but the interactions of moving objects are much more complex and are likely to cause inefficiencies. Obviously the amount of that would be hard to measure in real world conditions.
I call bullshit on the title. Those guys didn't even check recumbent bikes. And they didn't check having a cover around riders, either.
If you want to go for full efficiency, safety or practicality be damned, a recumbent that makes you lie basically flat just above the ground and covered all over should be really efficient. For maximum insanity, lie prone.
Or, since they allowed multiple riders, you could build a contraption that allows multiple people to ride in a recumbent position inside a single cover.
> Analysis of the vehicle performance showed that Eta requires less than 198 watts of pedal power at 90 km/h, which translates to a 9,544 MPGe highway fuel efficiency. According to Aerovelo, this is the highest per-passenger MPGe of any existing transportation technology at this speed.
Yeah. Lying down your glute is not activated as much. The upright position also gives better activation of the upper body which gives much better breathing.
Well if you go really really fast aero is the most important. The aerodynamics of an upright rider is worse than a semi truck. Also the breathing aspect is only really relevant for longer efforts. If you want to race 150 other guys through small European roads for 21 days in a row, up right is better.
Recumbent vs. upright is actually an over 100 year old battle, over misunderstanding each others needs and wants from a bike. Many recumbent people are still sour over UCI banning non-double diamond frames.
A cycling peloton is just humans imitating birds. If Peloton, the company, did not want to lose lawsuits it should have used a word that wasn't already in use in the same neighborhood.
They could have called the company Wopat or something, and people still would have bought the things (given Covid, but still).
I think I've known this for years. When I was a kid I had a book entitled "How things work". In it was a large picture, spread across 2 pages, showing birds, land animals, people in cars, trains, aeroplanes etc, all moving from left to right as if in a race. Above each participant was a figure indicating something like Joules per gram. The "participants" in the "race" were ranked according to this figure, with the front-runners having the lowest associated values.
Waay out in front was a man on a bicycle. Add in the help of cumulative drag and sharing the load against the wind resistance, it makes sense.
"It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal..."
This is an extremely small fraction of traffic (edit: in large countries like America), and only works if you're all going to the same place. Being able to zip onto the freeway, then insert/connect/merge into the "road train", perhaps with charging, could be amazing.
Public transit was made into a small fraction of traffic. [0] It absolutely doesn't have to be that way. If you live in a city you are likely going somewhere that a lot of other people are going to as well.
With proper urban planning a door to door car should only really make sense in a rural environment. And that is absolutely a needed mindshift to curb GHG emissions.
I made a deliberate choice of moving to a country and city with good governance and planning. I haven't owned a car in 5 years. When I do absolutely need a car I will just rent one for a weekend trip or for hauling big things. It still is a huge saving.
The only pro-car argument I can think of is the prepper aspect of having a getaway vehicle in the event of a natural disaster.
> Public transit was made into a small fraction of traffic.
I think "was made" is the key term, since that is what defines the current state of reality, which is where our solutions must exist. Any feasible solution will not requiring destroying the last 100 years of development, in the US. Improvements are still a good thing, especially if they can be implemented as a glorified, cooperative, cruise control.
I'm all for rail, since more trams could mean my 20 minute drive wouldn't have to be 3 hours by track + bus + 3 mile walk, but putting enough metal on the ground isn't trivial [1].
Worth noting that Europe went a long towards being car centric during the 20th century, and has since revered course. Of course, it was never as car centric as the US is, but it absolutely can be done.
"Park&Ride" hubs. Rather than having everyone commuting through the same routes and bottlenecking the same roads on rush hour you could drive/cycle/walk to your local suburb hub and catch a train/tram/metro to where you need to go.
There is nothing ground breaking or sci-fi about it. It has been done many times over in several places around the world both dense and sparse.
It just needs political will and budget. The main problem you guys have in the US is how entreched lobbyists are.
In The Netherlands, cars drove a total of 100 billion kilometers in 2019. For comparison, a total of 30 billion passenger-kilometers were made on public transit during the same year.
Granted, that's counting vehicle-kilometers and not person-kilometers for cars, but calling it an "extremely small fraction" is not quite accurate. ;-)
Sorry, I was speaking from an American mind. Here, 45% don't have access to public transit. Around 5% use it daily or weekly [1]. Statistics are much better in dense cities.
Even without a physical connection, a "virtual trailer hitch" would be easier to implement (I imagine, hah) than a general autopilot.
The control loop would have to reference the next vehicle in the chain, and adjust the speed to maintain a constant distance from it, as well as keep the centerlines of the two vehicles aligned. For emergency braking and other surprise situations a broadcast system would be useful.
Rolling resistance of vehicles with rubber tires is an order of magnitude worse than steel wheels of a train. Steel wheels are the key reason why trains are so efficient.
Since it's not feasible to lay track everywhere, and since this could be implemented in software, it could be an achievable, relatively cheap, and possibly near term, improvement. "Long range" road trains could include some hardware.
This isn't some new idea [1], so I'm not sure why I'm being downvoted. This has always been a goal for self driving.
The track isn't an inconvenience to be removed, track is the major source of the efficiency. Rubber-wheeled train cosplay would not achieve the same levels of efficiency.
"Critical mass" only makes sense in systems where you need a minimum concentration to achieve a self-sustaining feedback loop, but traffic is not such a system. You just need two cars to get the benefits of hypermiling via tailgating. But the amount of cooperation needed between the two cars is such that we'll probably never see it outside of long-haul trucks, and even then only within fleets operated by the same company.
I think for long haul trucks if this ever works every company will want in, and want each other in. Maybe there will be some system to ensure no cheating (pay the lead truck?), but there are enough companies that run trucks that it is easy to create a convoy on the fly, with someone else, but much harder to get one for your company.
Some safety is assumed from the start. Right now such things are banned and truckers are much more likely than average to actually maintain safe following distances.
It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal, but this new research suggests that a cyclist shielded from the wind is even more energy efficient than, say, a hang-glider.
What are they counting as the input energy for a hang-glider?
I kind of think of it as "free" in the way a ball falling from a height doesn't require any fuel to locomote.
Yes, you put energy into the throw. But if you count the guy hauling a hang-glider up a hill (or in other words it's potential energy at the top), I wouldn't think of hang-gliders as energy efficient at all. So either way I'm having trouble reconciling the comparison. Either they're infinitely efficient (zero input energy) or not comparably efficient.
Maybe they're counting the twitches / muscle movements and such of steering the apparatus while in flight?
It seems like having more people makes everything more efficient. For example, with hiking if you have 100 + people single file on a trail , the guy in front can stop, take a break, and rejoin at the end without everyone having to stop. repeat.
i think it can work if the second to first person on the line does not shift immedialty after the first person but waits until the first person rejoins at the end.
The second person starts the process 1 person-space behind the front of the line. Every person who takes a break and moves to the back moves the front of the group back by one person-space.
From an individual perspective, how is it any faster than walking alone (or everyone taking the same break at once, assuming they don't take any time to regroup or string out). If it isn't more efficient from any given person's perspective (for all of the walkers), it isn't better for the group.
I once drafted behind a 2 ton truck that was doing about 45 km/h, over the space of about a mile. It felt like cycling down a gentle hill: just a minimal effort to maintain speed.
Motorcycles can be insanely efficient, some pretty ordinary ones achieve well over 100mpg.
But internal combustion engines themselves are pretty maxed out on efficiency, in the mid 30% range.
At least in the US, motorcycles are more often toys than tools so people buy bikes that emphasize other characteristics at the great expense of efficiency, and the more practical and efficient options are not even for sale.
Yes, but anything can be a race if you set your mind to it, which is why we have terms like the "Embankment Peloton" to describe a class of aerodynamically-optimised road cyclists that commute eastwards during rush hour on their way to London's banking and legal centres:
Correct. A more widely used term (in my experience) for this sort of thing is a "pace line", which isn't always as wide as a peloton due to lack of road closure.
Riders form a paceline because of the crosswind which forces everyone to look for draft on the left or the right side of a rider in front of you. Eventually, there's not enough road for everyone to be in the draft and the first paceline is formed (also called an echelon).
More specifically though, paceline refers to the mechanics of the echelon, the way riders rotate, or take turns at the front to stay in the echelon. This rotation is the paceline.
Pelotons - the race variety of a paceline - can only be safely formed with road closures because they typically swell to fill at least one lane of the road. They are not just 1 rider behind another, but often 2-4 riders wide.
Pacelines for group rides and the like can be formed whenever, and they do not form just because of a crosswind. When I used to train with a group, we would almost always form pacelines in single file, on every ride.
Interesting, I’m not a French speaker but my Spanish is OK. Always thought it was rooted in “pelota” as ball - but after looking both meanings are accurate just one being a bit more literal
1630s, "a small body of soldiers acting together but separate from the main body of troops," from French peloton "platoon, group of people," literally "little ball" (15c.), hence, "agglomeration," diminutive of Old French pelote "ball" (see pellet).
They are indeed the same number of words, but as headlines go they are extremely weak compared to the original. In my view they are not at all close.
The original (before HN edited the title) told you what the subject was immediately. It went from specific to general.
"Planet's most energy efficient ..." is the most terrestrially broad introduction one could use.
Likewise, "New research finds ..." is such a common phrase that it almost repels people (particularly since much research is bogus).
It's only a subset of US English speaking people which will be confused by the original title. To the subset of US residents who have never heard of the company Peleton, and the hundreds of millions of English speakers outside the US, this headline wouldn't have been confusing at all.
It's not the "strength of the brand", it's a brand name that should have never been allowed in the first place because of that kind of confusion, that's specially why they went with that name, they knew, it is market manipulation, for the same reason Phone is not allowed as a phone brand
There's a difference between whether a name is sufficiently distinguished to trademark and whether it is prohibited as "market manipulation." One certainly could not trademark the word "phone," but it would be perfectly legal to sell a phone branded as such.
...and? Yes, there's a difference, but Peloton isn't just selling "peloton bikes," they've trademarked the name Peloton. Unless you are agreeing that a phone company named "Phone" would be as bad as a company named "Peloton"
Because the sensors aren't simple and there would be too many variables to account for.
The riders are not exact clones of each others. The bikes aren't going to be exactly identical either. You won't be able to have them ride in an exact straight line with zero wind and zero temperature fluctuation. You won't be able to track the position of 100+ riders to within sub-centimeter precision while moving at 60km/h.
The actual power measurement is easy: they already have sensors for that. But good luck trying to get them to give you that data: it's like asking a Formula 1 team for their engine performance data!
They all already have power meters! It seems like you should know that 2 riders of similar weight and profile are doing vastly different amounts of work, and extrapolate from there.
Of course, you won't be doing 5-10% the output because there's still mechanical losses and rolling losses, but they should have decent models of those as well.
"It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal"
Yah, that's not actually true. A human is around 25% efficient (counting only the actual energy in the food), while electric cars are around 60%.
And if you count the energy needed to grow the food, even gas cars are more efficient than humans. And that's even if you only count the payload and not the weight of the vehicle.
And flying birds easily are more efficient than humans on a bike because they can use wind to help them.
It's giving you the metric right there. Energy consumed per gram of weight moved per kilometre traveled. Not percentage of energy used for locomotion versus lost as heat (note that maintaining internal homeostasis in a human is not exactly "losing" energy to heat, but certainly some excess is generated when you're exercising as opposed to just sitting around).
You're definitely still right about creatures that can simply catch sea and air currents, though.
Yes, I saw that metric, and my point stands. Cars are more efficient than humans, even humans on bikes.
> note that maintaining internal homeostasis in a human is not exactly "losing" energy to heat
If you bike a lot you will eat more. People tend to forget that and assuming the biking is "free" energy. I guess if it's just a causal activity then it is, but if you do it to commute you will end up eating more.
Is your number for electric cars including the losses of creating that electricity (coal is perhaps 30-40% efficient, solar around 15-20%). Otherwise, we're comparing apples with oranges. Or perhaps, since all energy (perhaps lets put nuclear aside for now) comes from the sun, we can compare system efficiency between solar energy input and energy/g/km output.
Humans on bikes can also use the wind to help them; birds fly in formations that greatly increase system efficiency (much like pelotons)
If you count the losses of solar power you should also count the losses of photosynthesis (and the energy used for farming, and the energy lost by the animals that you eat).
Given that the energy used for both humans and electric cars is about 50% from dinosaurs, an internal combustion engine car has better efficiency on dinosaur to joule conversion than an electric car. So a human is basically not competitive with any form of transportation.
> And if you count the energy needed to grow the food, even gas cars are more efficient than humans. And that's even if you only count the payload and not the weight of the vehicle.
It's a lot more complicated than that. A certain baseline is eaten anyway for nutrition, and some foods have too many calories per unit of other nutrients for sedantry life. Maize for example can provide a decent chunk of your protein (with some pulses to round out the amino acids) and some other nutrients, but you need to be active for an hour or two per day to not get sick from the quantity of carbohydrates that entails. There's also a minimum activity level that is best for health that many people do not reach (so the calories between current activity and that threshold have a negative cost).
If we take wheat or oats as a fuel, the CO2e footprint is roughly the same ballpark as the mass of food (or less if they are grown in certain niche ways which are high labour or use green ammonia for fertilizer reagent and electric tractors).
100g of either will get you 15-20km at a calm pace. This is ballpark 5-15g/km or roughly on par with electric trains.
You need to fill an EV with people every trip to match the upper bound here (including embodied carbon). Including infrastructure makes the bike a winner. Electric busses might still place if full. ICEs are out of the running.
If your fuel is exclusively beef protein though then better to use the deisel truck or just go set fire to a forest or something.
The optimal is a solar charged recumbent pedelec because it uses sunlight so much more efficiently than plants do. Something with just enough motor to keep you going at 25km/h on a mild 2% incline with the same power from the rider as walking, just enough battery to last one trip (about what a laptop holds, or double that to decrease discharge % and increase durability) and just enough solar to charge while parked. You can increase speed/distance to around 40 km/h at roughly constant emissions by adding a fairing.
After that is a ferry full of people.
Then a train/regular bike.
If you need to go extremely fast/far only trains work for large quantities of people, and the ones for whom coverage is prohibitive are best with cars.
edit: Forgot the best part. The formation ended when someone near the front swerved to avoid a hole in the trail. Person behind them--taken by surprise--abruptly braked. Chaos ensued. Chaos propagated upstream and eventually got to me. I ran over a downed bike and flew over my own bike landing on my handle bars--broke a rib (though didn't know it until a few days later). Why would the organizers of a casual charity ride allow formation riding, you ask? They don't.