I couldn't ride a bike until, ugh, maybe 21? Once I discovered the joy of it, I never let it go and still biking every day for almost 20 years.
When I lived in China, it was very easy to bike. China's infrastructure is new and it has dedicated lanes. It can be very stressful though because it's so dense, and since there's general lack of any culture or manners, people on scooters can be very rude and pushy. Also nobody would help you if you fall, they just keep passing by (source: fell 4-5 times in my 12 years in China).
Now I'm living in Bangkok which looks like cyclist's hell: horrible pavement, narrow roads, motorcycles, and constant traffic jams. However, I find it easier to bike since everybody are generally courteous to each other, and I fell once and had like 10 people rush to help me. Very heartwarming.
The point is, you can build a great biking infrastructure, but culture is very important as well.
I feel the same.I am more of a casual rider, but when I ride my bike in me feel so good. It is a source of health and happiness. I hope to be able to do it for many years. I wish cities in this side of the Atlantic had more biking infrastructure.
Bikes are such wonderful machines: they're immensely practical, scrutable, cheap and easy to maintain, and just a joy to operate. There's something really liberating about having the option to bike for short-distance trips (the majority trips in the US are within 5 miles of home [1]) and avoiding the stress of traffic, parking, and gas prices.
Many people don't know that the bicycle is one of the most efficient means of transporting a humans in terms of energy needed to move a mile. It is more efficient than walking and way more efficient than using a car.
Side note, never heard of the band mentioned in the article but it sounds interesting:
Bicycle is "a band that rolls across the country on bicycles and rocks in towns and cities along the way. ... 'Heavy metal folk rap' is how the New York Times coined the band's sound."
Unfortunately the link to the band's page appears to be gone, and there's nothing on google about them. Rare to find something these days that has almost 0 web presence!
a) Biking as exists in the U.S. / Canada is a leisure-class demographic activity and not a "bread-and-butter" earning activity. If you did a survey of bicyclists you'd find they are of a certain tax bracket nowhere remotely close to low-income. Study after study shows they skew high income earners / well educated.
b) The average non-wealthy American wants thinks his tax money is going to keeping the road infrastructure in good repair.
c) Outside of well-heeled zip codes we are not going to see bike lane infrastructure be given priority over such more pressing concerns.
d) We could all have great things if we were not warring all the time to get small things passed, much less a luxury ( in the scheme of things ) like bike lane infrastructure.
I'm not even talking about the opposition from businesses here.[1]
[1]
S.F.
Several businesses along Valencia Street have posted signs in their windows that read, “This Bike Lane Is Killing Small Businesses and Our Vibrant Community,” with a QR code for the San Francisco Small Business Coalition. |
> If you did a survey of bicyclists you'd find they are of a certain tax bracket nowhere remotely close to low-income. Study after study shows they skew high income earners / well educated.
This line of argument reminds me of the red-dots-airplane meme. In places where bad infrastructure makes cycling impractical as anything but a hobby, of course you mostly get lycra-wearing midlife crisis guys who do it as a hobby. In places where the infrastructure is actually good and safe, you get a whole spectrum of people riding.
To add to this; in the Netherlands where I’m from there’s more bikes than people.
Out of all the people I know the only person that does not ride a bike is my middle age father who owns a motorcycle. Even my nearly 90 year old grandma uses a tricycle (for safety) to do her grocery shopping.
Hm okay I looked at some facts [1] for the US and biking is fairly uniformly distributed between income brackets. The highest bracket is > $100,000 at 38% but the second highest is < $20,000 at 35%. So I think we're working with different facts here.
In cultures where the car is a status symbol, cycling is bimodally distributed by income - people who can't afford a car, and people who very definitely can afford a very nice car. For everyone in the middle, cycling is a status threat unless it's congruent with their identity as e.g. an athlete, an environmentalist or a bohemian.
Successful cycling cultures elevate the status of cycling, but they also denigrate the status of the car; people in these cultures are slightly embarrassed when they drive, because cars are recognised as being somewhat antisocial.
That's people who cycled "once" in the previous year. This discussion so about people who cycle to commute or otherwise regularly and I agree with the vibe that it's only for the rich or otherwise fortunate in the US. I don't have access to that data you linked but the headline suggests that it's more or less irrelevant to this discussion.
Honestly once a year is a good measurement. You want numbers on people who might bicycle. Doing it seldom means there is a chance you will start doing it. My feeling is that bicyclists are one of the most misunderstood groups just because we are so different from each other.
Unfortunately I can't agree or argue against vibes so I'm not sure how to properly respond. Do I disagree on vibes?
EDIT: To be a bit more productive about this, I referenced Guerra et al. [1] which shows that cycle commuting seems to be negatively correlated to income in the US and sharply negatively correlated with single vehicle ownership and positively correlated with being male. But this is just commuting and we know that there's more to transportation than just commuting and commuters tend to be more male as a whole anyway.
thanks for the link, that article does challenge some of the views I had on cycle commuting and income. Where I live, there is definitely seems to be a positive correlation but reading the "archetypes" from that abstract made me realize that there my city is probably not typical.
People tend to notice the neon clad roadie on an expensive bike taking the lane on a busy thoroughfare.
People don't tend to notice the guy riding his Wal-Mart mountain bike on the sidewalk on his way to work.
And they also don't tend to notice all the sensible, practical, riders who know to take the (relatively) car free residential side streets en route to wherever they need to be.
People also don't notice all the single-occupant cars that make up the bulk of road congestion. Drivers should want more people to ride bikes, because each represents approximately one single-occupant car removed from the road.
People tend to see what they want to see. If they want the riders be the rich sports guys, they will notice all the rich sport guys and ignore everyone else.
These things are self-reinforcing because as things stand bikes can't be used for commuting by most people because the infrastructure doesn't exist. Make it easier and safer to bike, and you'll see the demographics shift.
Another part of this problem is affordable housing. People can't live close to where they work. Reduce this problem along with improving biking infrastructure and you'll see an uptick in biking.
"Several businesses along Valencia Street have posted signs in their windows that read[...]"
Sure. Several businesses said the same thing about protected bus lanes, but studies have shown it's increased business for those on the path, because it makes it possible for _more_ customers to actually access their businesses.
Cars are fundamentally worse than public transportation or biking for small businesses as a whole, as they reduce density, and further consolidation, which favors larger businesses and hurts small businesses. The problem is that business owners tend to be drivers and their biases don't line up with reality, which is why you tend to see their personal politics interfere with their business interests.
This is one of those things that smacks of HN people thinking the world operates to their whims and fancies.
Go over to Amsterdam and see how little bicycling actually gets done outside of the core that HN loves to throw up as this cycling utopia.
Real people have real world needs. Bicycling meets very few of those. Especially in places that have barely four months of precipitation-free bicycling weather. Please stop thinking the world is like the urban cores of a handful of cities.
In the Netherlands around 30% of people cycle to their work. [1]
In Belgium around 32% cycle to their work. [2]
I would think that is a significant amount no?
I cycle to my work every day. It is around 9 KM and takes me around 20 minutes. For rain you have a rain suite, for winter you have a jacket. The amount of times I took the car in rainy Belgium is 4 times in 2023 because of storm conditions.
As more and more people are starting to see the hassle free transportation method of cycling, they also start taking the bike and infrastructure keeps improving.
I live in Seattle and have a mid tail cargo bike. I regularly shop at the local nursery, hardware store, or Costco on my bike. My bike configuration can carry about one full but not overflowing shopping cart. Because I don't need to stop at stop signs (wa state law) I make roughly the same time to my destinations within about 5-8 miles. I also never need to worry about parking.
I have a seat that a kid can sit in comfortably for school drop off.
I carry rain pants and a waterproof shell in my cargo pockets on the bike, and my helmet has a magnetically held visor. Once you have a waterproof shell, weather is really not a deterrent until it's physically difficult to move the bike.
So, it's a mode of transport that covers nearly every trip, in nearly every condition, nearly year round.
When I go to the country to visit family, I take my bike. I can navigate just as well, but much slower in rural areas (most people drive faster on rural roads than in urban areas and the distances are longer.)
I'm also (believe it or not) a real person. Bikes absolutely work for real people who live real lives.
One of the comments in the article says “The times I've visited Munich, the thing that stood out the most was seeing regular-ass working folks in business attire, dresses, whatever, riding every kind of bike you can think of- mostly old, well maintained steel” this has been my experience in various German cities, seeing guys going to work on a construction site riding a bike.
Are you talking about bicycling as it exists in the US / Canada as you previously constrained your post to? or are we now talking about the usefulness of a bicycle globally?
I live in Groningen, NL and most people I know (of all income brackets) cycle to work if they have a job in or near the city. It’s the default form of transportation in this city (and often much faster than going by car).
woziacki’s income bracket also doesn’t apply here. You can get a decent second-hand bike here for 200-300 Euro (more than an order of magnitude cheaper than a car) and maintenance is much cheaper than a car, plus no vehicle taxes, road insurance, etc.
I love Utrecht. It's a wonderful city to live in and it's what Amsterdam claims to be in the tourist brochure. There are wonderful coffee shops like the village, bicycle shops like repack, microbrewery like de krommerharring, there's a nice collection of restaurants, and I can walk basically everywhere I don't actually need a bike. If you are bored in the weekend you can take a kayak and float around the canals. And when I do ride, it's less than ten minutes before you get out of the city into trails in the forest or roads. And it's only a 60km ride to the beach if that's your sort of thing. Utrecht is a happy place to live.
Maybe you should take a step back, and reconsider whether arguing that people who ride bikes "are not real, or do not have real world needs" makes any sense.
Nothing that you have written is original. These are the usual arguments against micro-mobility. They don't stand scrutiny, and they are actively being disproven across a growing number of locations around the world, small and large.
I'm not sure this is true. It's very common that people cycle in the rain, from towns 15-20+km away, all seasons, in the Netherlands. People further away commonly take the train and take one of the ov fiets for the last bit. I would like to see statistics from the Dutch government before I believe your anecdotes. The bike parking garage at my work in Utrecht seems to be full no matter what is going on outside.
Business opposition is completely irrelevant on account of businesses having been proved wrong time after time on the impacts of adding bike lanes/removing parking/etc on their streets. Consistently incorrect.
This was interesting: "By contrast, a person on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than a pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. "
That sounds about right for a bike on a paved road, but I would assume over uneven ground the ratio of efficiency is less? Is a hiker on a trail that much less efficient than a mountain bike on the same trail? I would think that at higher slopes the efficency ratio goes down even more due to the mass of the bike?
There's a small loss possible due to tires slipping a bit, also higher rolling resistance due to usually wider and less smooth tires. The grade needs to get steeper than 10% on pavement or off for the weight penalty of a bicycle to count against the rider versus the efficiency, depending upon the weight of the bicycle+rider. If you look at the times of guys in the Tour de France for climbs up mountains the fastest can do a four minute mile on the uphill parts, here's last years winner on a 10 mile climb
https://www.bicycling.com/tour-de-france/a44465449/tour-de-f...
For reference if a marathon runner could go that fast I believe they would run a 1:45 marathon - up a mountain. The top end cross country mountain bikes weigh about 6-10 pounds more than the bikes the road professionals are using.
I haven’t done scientific experiments but I think a MTB is still quite efficient on average. But a lot less than a road bike without suspension nor grip on a flat road.
When going uphill on difficult terrain with my mountain bike, I sometimes get passed by trail runners. If we continue on the same path, I pass them back on flat and downhill sections so it may be worth it. I can also bike quite a bit longer than I can trail run.
Sometimes I have to push or carry the bike and the efficiency isn’t great for sure but a mountain bike isn’t that heavy and you can use it as support too. But it’s slower than a hiker going uphill.
Good walking paths are always faster by bicycle. There is a 1000 km path through the woods of Stockholm it is not ment for cycling but I can still go at least 3x times the distance with no extra energy. This is with a normal bike.
Indeed and it is perfectly fine to cycle there it just roots and rocks over the path. That said it is almost impossible to use the routes near Stockholm during summer.
I experienced this this week. Started having lateral foot pain while walking and standing over the weekend. But no pain while pedaling. I walk considerably less when biking to work than driving to work because I keep my bike in my office instead of walking from the parking garage. What a relief it was to move without pain.
"On January 20, 2021, Bradley was struck from behind by a motorist while riding his bicycle near his home in St. George, Utah, which resulted in a traumatic spinal cord injury in his neck that left him paralyzed.[39] A driver attempted to pass Bradley on the left in the same travel lane while Bradley himself was in the process of passing another car parked on the shoulder of the road."
So not really a bicycle accident, but a motorist accident?
In case they would both have been riding bicycles, I doubt Mr Shawn Bradley would have been so unfortunate.
Might sound like nitpicking, but in places actually designed for multi-modal traffic and not just for cars these accidents are very rare.
I once had a very expensive leather backpack stolen. Inside were my passport, a DSLR, laptop, and some other things. Total value was in the thousands, easily.
It bothered me (and was a financial burden) when that stuff was stolen. But when my $400 hybrid bike was stolen a few years later, it bothered me twice as much, if not more. I think because a bike is a durable, daily thing that you come to depend on, while expensive gadgets are just gadgets.
Additionally, when you use a bike long enough you'll often end up making a number of tiny adjustments to it over time. The monetary value of these adjustments may be minimal—add a saddle and rack and bags that fit just right, adjust the handlebars, swap on either more supple or puncture-resistant tires depending on your needs, maybe tweak the gear ratios—but they add up to make the bike work perfectly for you.
When a bike is stolen, the difficulty of replicating this "perfect setup" can be wildly disproportionate to the cost of the bike.
> I worked on both the retail and manufacturing side of bikes for a couple of decades, seeing it from the early days of MTB to its current form. I really love riding, but the moral high ground of the bicycle purist has also sheltered a commodity-driven, economically-rarified (in the US), and not very diverse industry from some necessary critique and change. Celebratory statements about bikes are often made by people who have the civic or trail infrastructure and economic freedom to experience just the positive sides of cycling. There are many places where the engineering advantages aren't enough, for reasons that include geography, climate, gender, and labor rights. There are also huge issues around the increases in traffic in formerly remote areas, due in part to the ease we can access those areas on our comfortable and fast bikes.
Ive been cycling since forever. I couldn't tell you how many times I went over my handlebars before I was a teen.
Last year I bought an ebike. I love it. Cycling is different with a ebike. Hills don't particularly matter, you choose the speed you want to go, and all leg energy simply moves you faster then that speed. You put in the same amount of workout, as much as you please, and when you get tired, the bike takes you home. You also reach much further distances then you normally would without, so you get to see more.
But my bike means nothing to me. I will replace it in an instant if the right opportunity knocks.
"Equipped with this tool, a person outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well" M-F morning this cheeky little chihuahua gives me a run for my money tho
Imagine a world where instead of giant SUVs clogging up billion-dollar road projects, we had park-and-rides and biking infrastructure.
No more obesity epidemic. Cleaner cities. Cheaper cities! Less micro-particles from tires filling our waterways. Less traffic, things that actually need to be transported by cars can get where they are going faster.
But then how do the road construction firms and automobile manufacturers make their bread?
Forget the park and ride, a metro system with bike parking! Living in Taipei has been a dream. Take the metro somewhere, grab a ubike to complete your journey. Feeling fat after a massive hot pot dinner? Grab a ubike and bike home.
Now we just need to pressure the city to build actually bike infrastructure on the road...
I think the optimal number of SUVs that should be allowed on the road should be exactly 0. For safety reasons, efficiency reasons, and ecological reasons..
Obesity comes from being lazy and eating lots, the impact of bikes on obesity would be equivalent to the rolling friction of a fat person rolling down a hill
But what you eat and what you do are massively influenced by your environment. Rare person who can resist the bombardment of ads from the junk food industry.
It's due to inactivity, look it up. Or as WHO puts it: "Overweight and obesity result from an imbalance of energy intake (diet) and energy expenditure (physical activity)."
I have seen too many overweight people do too much useful work to believe that.
It is not like your time in gym or being obsessed over diet would be useful to anyone else. They are you having hobbies, to large extend. An overweight person spending that time actively engaged with kids or on the job work more, by definition.
I grew up on a bike. It was the only way to get around the neighborhood with friends, as if something was more than a couple hundred feet, you did it on bike. We biked to the city nearby to see movies or hang out at the mall. We biked into the woods to get away from everyone. We biked across town because it was something to do. Bikes were freedom.
My father was big into cycling. Diagnosed with diabetes as a juvenile, he believed if he stopped cycling he would die (unfortunately, the disease ultimately won, as it always does… but the last thing he was doing before going to the hospital for a 5 month ordeal after which he died was riding his bike). He participated in endurance races and tours, he rode his bike 20-30 miles each way to work and back almost every day of the week, the Tour de France was his Super Bowl and local or other international races were his college bowls. He spent a lot of time reading biographies of renowned cyclists. Some of my most cherished memories are our several TOSRV tours together on a heavy steel Japanese tandem, even the days of icy rain, baking sun, or when Dad had a reaction and I had to pedal us both… uphill with a headwind.
My riding dropped almost completely off, with spikes of interest here and there. I rode my bike multiple times a week to visit him in the hospital before he died, a 40 mile round trip. Those moments alone (other than the terrible traffic) were moments of respite and quiet in my fear and anxiety over my dad’s descent, my recent and failing marriage, my trouble with alcohol, my trouble with my career. He died and left me his bike, a Masi Gran Criterium that he bought around the time I was born, rode every day, painstakingly overhauled and sunk ungodly amounts of time and money into over the years he had it.
I rode it on and off. I’ve done a few smaller tours in the 2010s until I had a health concern. I rode it during the pandemic with my mom until I started getting bad saddle and wrist pains. I started becoming afraid something would happen to the Masi and I would lose a deep connection to my father. But I’ll be god damned if I don’t feel he’s right there beside me when I ride it, and all the world goes quiet except the soft clicking of the bike and the woosh of air blowing by. Yet, I keep making excuses for not riding.
I’m gonna get that god damned bike off the wall and go for a ride.
Another thing to think about from the high energy efficiency is how bad energy-wise current electric cars are, and of coruse this translates to resource use in battery materials as well when transporting the median nr of passengers.
But yes, a gas car is a worse thing still than a electric car, neither are sustainable. We need to cut car use rapidly to mitigate the climate disaster.
My bikes (and my dogs) saved me not only during the lockdowns, but in a time when my life was way darker than that, between october 2015 and march 2018 (couldn't get a job for much I tried to, completely heartbroken, several of my dogs died, bullied by my own sister, parents' illness...) so I definitely can relate to this.
Trully one of the noblest inventions humanity has made.
When I got covid I had a few months where I had really bad brain fog and bad lung capacity and couldn't do much. Every evening I'd do a low effort loop on my bike around the neighborhood to get out of the house. Since then I've bought a nicer road bike and am putting up 100km a week and doing some real climbs and it's been my favorite hobby.
When I was a young man, I was riding my bike through a wealthy exurb in Silicon Valley. An older man motored by in a luxury vehicle and I thought how nice it must be to have so much wealth. Then I realized that perhaps the thought crossing his mind was "how nice it must be to be young and vigorous enough to go out cycling".
I would ride more if the city I lived in made it safer to do so. Chicago was a bike paradise when I lived in that city I never owned a car while living in Chicago.
Bill was one of the 4 best college players ever and was the best player on one of the best NBA teams of all-time (1974 Portland Blazers). But he missed more games than he played during his career, 680 and 488 respectively, due to a laundry list of injuries. He had 39 orthopedic surgeries. His chronically injured foot led him to file a malpractice suit against the Blazers for due to his dissatisfaction for the care. He needed XLIF (fusion) surgery for his back in 2009. Despite his missed opportunities in the NBA and chronic pain, he chose to live his life with joy as is apparent to anyone whose listened to his interviews or call a broadcast. RIP to a legend.
From this: "I have not been able to walk for enjoyment or pleasure or exercise in 41 years" - I'd guess the usual way basketball ruins bodies - it's probably fucked up his hips and knees.
Edit: From one of the links:
“I have had 38 orthopedic operations,” Walton told Bicycling. “Both my ankles are fused. I have an artificial knee. I have a new spine. I have broken countless bones. Every bone in both hands. Every bone in both feet; both legs. I have broken my back. I’ve had countless facial and cranial fractures. I spent my life falling down, getting hacked and fouled and getting in fights.”
If you enjoy something enough, you keep doing it in spite of some setbacks or pain.
Over 25 years I've cracked ribs a few times and dislocated a shoulder once from not being a good enough motorcycle rider. I am still riding motorcycles.
If you enjoy something enough _and_ are making a shitload of money doing it, I'd guess some people's injury list would get quite horrifying before they chose to be "done".
Hardwood floors take a toll on knees, for one thing. My brother had a 15+ year professional career and can't sit for very long (plane, cinema, etc) without needing to extend his leg. And that's after missing almost no games in-season through injury; it just built up over time.
Or mat vs hardwood. I have a friend who practiced savate for years on hard floors (rural kid, we had no money for full equipment at the gym, also savate is practiced with shoes which are often forbidden on mats) and he said recently that one of his regret was not insisting to train on the judo mats/tatamis, and not because he fell often, but because it ended up straining his knees.
I would say that "low-key" is a strange phrase to use, as it's essentially jazz slang (like a low, bass note), while also somewhat outdated. "Low-key" would be how you would ask for drugs at a party or a show. You want to buy drugs, but you don't necessarily want everyone to know you want to buy drugs, so you ask the right person who knows the guy that knows the guy - perhaps you whispered your request all, "low-key" like.
I would sort of agree that it's a strange place to put it in this sentence. It kinda needs an em-dash or something:
"Walton knew: the bicycle is -- low-key -- one of humankind’s greatest inventions"
But I would edit that all out as it's not needed and disturbs the flow of the sentence.
I think what the author is trying to say is more, "underappreciated".
Walton knew: the bicycle is one of humankind’s most underappreciated, yet greatest inventions.
Perhaps in the vein of indoor plumbing, tho many people go without riding bikes, while none of us who have indoor plumbing would give it up.
Or maybe even "under the radar". You know the best place to eat in town, but it's just some hole in the wall managed by a single guy, but god-damn do those mashed potatoes slap.
Bicycle love isn't something advertised, like a car is. You get on a bike and you fall in love with it. Attraction over promotion.
In this context, it just means "underappreciated" or "less widely known or acknowledged than other inventions of similar magnitude of impact".
I don't think it's millennial slang; I'm almost 50 and I've heard it used this way all my life.
However, I was vaguely aware that it had some original, more technical meaning, specific to some discipline like composing music or something like that. My interest in investigating was limited, though, so I only asked GPT-4o, who claimed:
> Originally, the term "low-key" was used in reference to a lighting technique in photography and cinematography. It described a style that utilized less lighting to create a mood of intimacy, mystery, or dramatic contrast. This usage emphasized the subtle, understated nature of the lighting, which is less intense and less prominent than high-key lighting. Over time, "low-key" evolved to take on broader meanings, including understated, subdued, or not seeking attention, before arriving at its contemporary connotation of something or someone being low-profile or modest.
(I'll accept that, I guess, unless disputed/refuted here by the actually sentient.)
That an interesting question! I had never seen that usage of “low-key” either.
Some similar examples found on the web:
“Astro Bot is low key one of the best Sony franchises and I’ll fight anyone who says otherwise.”
“Nitro navy is low key one of our fave colours on the Kreissage RS. What’s yours?”
“I think Flora is low key absolutely hysterical.”
“Am i the only one who thinks this soundtrack is lowkey really good?”
“Feels good, it's my first time buying a [chest] binder.... i saw reviews saying like oh i should've bought a smaller one but nope it is lowkey too small but i sure can squeeze myself into it and it looks great.”
I see it used as a conversational gambit to downplay the impact of something you’re about to say (which might otherwise be received as over-the-top, or sensationalised, or aggressive, or ripe for someone to argue with).
It’s a bit similar to how one might start a statement with “Honestly…” - to flag that what’s coming might be more than usually challenging or blunt.
Let's say it is an order of magnitude more (~100kcal/km), I ride about 30km per day average right now that'd mean I burn 3kcal/day extra just from this training. I am eating nowhere near 5kcal/day (assuming ~2kcal maintenance just for living plus other movement during the day) so I'd be losing weight very quickly if that estimate were correct.
The .15cal/g is much closer to what I'm probably burning. According to my Garmin it was 540 calories which is 18kcal/km, and I weigh ~86kg which puts me at about .20cal/g, not much higher than Walton's number. And I was definitely not taking a casual pace, there was no coasting on that ride.
We still understand what you mean, but FYI most of your numbers are off by a factor 1000.
A single calorie is a completely irrelevant amount of energy at the scale of a human body, hence the use of kcal as the basic unit when talking about nutrition. In the first paragraph you mean 3000kcal, 5000kcal, etc. Not 3kcal, 5kcal, etc.
The reference daily caloric intake is 2000kcal, not 2000 calories.
This is all made more confusing by the fact that in most of the world "kcal" is just pronounced "calories" (ignoring the 'k' which is implied in this context), while in the US "Calories" (with a capital 'C') stands for kilo calories.
But back to your point, 0.15cal/g/km = 0.15kcal/kg/km indeed passes the intuition test. For a 100kg bike+rider package that would be 15kcal/km => 1500kcal for a 100km, which seems to be the correct order of magnitude. Of course this is an obvious oversimplification, but it gets the point its trying to make across.
You can't outrun a bad diet, and you certainly can't outcycle it. But it keeps you fit, keeps your legs toned, and (depending on where you are) gets you from A to B for nearly free.
I agree with running but not cycling - I’d say it’s merely a question of how hard you try.
Cycling is one of the very few sports (along with maybe swimming) that you can do for extreme amounts of time without acutely harming your body.
The issue that does affect people is that if you started with the bad diet, you probably don’t have the fitness to produce the required output that would overcome it.
If you manage to increase your fitness so that you sustain higher outputs however you absolutely can out-train your terrible diet!
Even with running - especially with running - you can easily burn enormous amounts of calories.
There are two problems with this saying.
First, nobody knows what a bad diet is in the context of this saying. How many calories are we talking? How poorly balanced is the diet?
Let's take a basic example: assume the perfect diet for a sedentary person, well balanced, exactly the right amount of calories, etc. Then on top of it, this person eats a 200g pack of Haribo 4 times a week. Surely this makes that diet insanely bad, right? Well, not really, it's only about 500 excess kcal/day which would be very easily compensated if this person had an active lifestyle. So how insanely bad does the diet need to be until the argument actually works? This saying is usually directed at people who want to lose weight, surely nobody is trying to lose weight in good faith if they drink soda daily, eat donuts left and right, and some haribos to top it off.
The second problem, is that people are scarily sedentary and view what should be a completely normal amount of physical activity as impossible. So what upper bound are we putting on the "running" part of the saying?
Doing 1-2 hours of sport 4 times during the work week, plus one longer physical activity on the week end (e.g., half a day hike or bike ride) is a completely normal amount of sport.
4-10 hours of exercise a week, for starters, is a lot more than what most people achieve. And it burns a ridiculously low amount of calories. Maybe ~300kcal/hour of excess calories burnt. That's ~3000kcal/week. You can ruin that in one sitting at Pizza Hut in under an hour.
If your goal is weight loss, and you have a choice between an extra hour of exercise, or eating one less Mars bar a week, skipping the Mars bar will be better for your weight loss.
Yes it's a lot more than what people "achieve", but it's the amount that people should be doing. Doing sport is not a chore that must be "achieved", it's a pleasant and relaxing activity that most people should be enjoying. The entire discourse around sport and physical activity is fucked up in the first place. When you hear public health official advising to do sport, they are almost apologising for it.
Counting kcal per hour of sport like that doesn't make any sense. 300kcal is 1h of brisk walking (non-sedentary people do it as part of their daily life, and probably don't count it toward their physical activity). It's also 1h of weight lifting, which most people would probably consider intensive sport. OTOH it's only 30min of jogging, which is a utterly trivial amount of sport for any healthy person. Those are rough approximations obviously.
After clicking the "reply" button of this post, I'm leaving for training with my sports club. 30min brisk walk each way to get there, and 1.5h of sport that is estimmated to burn 500kcal/h. Burning calories is trivial for active people.
That's the point though - if you get your fitness up then 600 kcal/hour should be possible on the bike and it should be sustainable to do day after day at that volume. Mix in the odd day of doing things super hard at 800-900kcal/hour and you're make an enormous difference to your weekly output.
If your goal is weight loss you should probably skip a mars bar every now and then, but I think you're underestimating what's possible after a bit of training and fitness improvement.
The exercise however will be better for your health and in the long term probably to weight loss too. The overall impact od sport on your body is not just calories burned.
I don't understand why people bring up totally ludicrous binge eating into this discussion.
Eating 3000 calories in one sitting is hard. Like, genuinely difficult, you're probably stuffing yourself uncomfortable and then in a food coma afterwards hard.
It reminds me of those silly TV shows with depressed 500lbs weirdos who just stuff their face all day. No-one normal is doing that. I mean christ it's only a bit less than half a kilo of straight mayonnaise.
I hate this meme. Adding mild sport to the lifestyle consistently improves peoples health results. It improves how they feel on emotional level too. And in my experience, hunger/satiety regulation works better when I do mild sport. So, if the loosing weight thing is about more then just an aesthetics, if there is a hint of "I actually care about health too" motivation, then cycling or running or whatever sport one likes adds a lot of benefit.
Certainly going to work by bike is better for weight itself then going by car.
> Certainly going to work by bike is better for weight itself then going by car.
"Certainly"? Not really. Depends entirely on your habits. If you get to work after your bike ride and eat a Snickers because it made you peckish, and you didn't do that when going by car, you've effectively done nothing for your weight.
It's true that exercise is good for you regardless. But it is orders of magnitude easier to ingest calories through food than it is to burn them through exercises.
If it made you hungry more, it is because your body needs some more nutrition as the trip was something body still needs to accustom itself to. There is nothing damaging with that. It likely means you had too small breakfast which can be composed of slow metabolizing food.
If you go to work on bike regularly, your body don't even register it as something to triger you needing more food. If you are extra hungry after 30 min transport trip on bike, you are likely in very bad physical shape.
98% of diets end up failure in the long term, precisely because just skipping food does nit work in the long term. You end up miserable, tired, passive, anemic, underperfoming on the job.
Commuting by bicycle is time efficient though, since you will do exercise instead. It also makes other training more efficient since your base fitness goes up.
Yes, this is very true. In my case, I think my weight loss from mountain biking comes from riding hills I wouldn't normally (and often pushing up hills), eating better (I'm not sitting at my desk and therefore spend less time snacking), and building leg muscle.
Running is a much quicker way to burn calories. I hate running. :)
When I lived in China, it was very easy to bike. China's infrastructure is new and it has dedicated lanes. It can be very stressful though because it's so dense, and since there's general lack of any culture or manners, people on scooters can be very rude and pushy. Also nobody would help you if you fall, they just keep passing by (source: fell 4-5 times in my 12 years in China).
Now I'm living in Bangkok which looks like cyclist's hell: horrible pavement, narrow roads, motorcycles, and constant traffic jams. However, I find it easier to bike since everybody are generally courteous to each other, and I fell once and had like 10 people rush to help me. Very heartwarming.
The point is, you can build a great biking infrastructure, but culture is very important as well.