Bikes are the greatest logistics machine ever created. They're light, cheap, easily repaired, can car 10x their own weight, and never run out of fuel. Like any tool, they have their niche (or niches). I wouldn't use a bike to move granite blocks, or to carry a family of 8 from San Francisco to Yosemite National Park. In this blog post we will explore some of the bike misconceptions that we've been taught.
Time
When making the choice, people consider only one variable: time. Others do come to mind though, such as cost, physical effort, and safety. A fifth, hard-to-quantify variable, coolness or "sex appeal" is worth considering, but that's for a different article. Basically, in the US, we assume driving is fastest, biking slowest, and transit, somewhere in the middle -but, given the lack of investment, the infrequent service just kills it.
We are taught that driving is faster, but this is not, and cannot be true. Certainly, if all roads were straight, there were no other vehicles, people, or objects on the road, and if there were no traffic signals, this might be true. However, over most distances traveled by Americans in their car, the bike is faster, just as fast, or somewhat slower than the car. This is because despite it all, humans -Americans included- rarely venture far from home.
Though Google Maps is very poor at modeling how humans move outside of cars, you can prove this to yourself.
Find a destination 2 miles from your house, like a convenience store or bar. Route yourself there and compare the time estimate for driving and cycling directions.
You'll find that cycling is almost precisely as fast as driving.
Now, run this simulation at different times of day. You'll see that cycling can be (and often is) faster.
I've run this test in real life many times. I'm a strong and fearless cyclist, so I always beat the Google estimates for any trips under 5 miles. When I borrow my beloved's e-bike, I probably cause Google's servers to catch fire --and so will you. She usually comes in just at Google's predictions --she's pretty cautious. In other words, cycling is about as fast as driving for short distances, especially if you use an e-bike.
The reasons why this is true is intuitive: bikes being smaller have less of a time penalty for stopping and starting, can navigate around traffic and other obstacles, can physically and legally use more paths than cars (such as bike paths and sidewalks [in many places]). This truth is why many logistics companies in Europe and some in the US, have considered switching their last-mile delivery to e-bikes. Bikes pull right up to the delivery point, saving companies and their customers billions of dollars.
Cars Are Slower Than you Think!
Ok, so after about 5 miles, a car is markedly faster than a bike, no matter how big your quads are. But then there's traffic and parking. When you consider that we all tend to get into our cars at the same time of day to do the same things and go to the same places (sounds like a job for transit), you realize that cars never reach their maximum or optimal speed. This is no surprise to Americans, and yet, culture being what it is, we all still default to car usage. Another major consumption of car time is driving around for parking. Getting in and out of parking lots and parking spaces is tedious, expensive and very time consumptive. There's plenty of good research into this fact of carlandia, so we'd rather link to articles to help you learn more. Suffice it to say, the car is great idea in a world where it is the exception, not he default.
Effort
Ok, it's true, cycling takes more physical effort than driving. And thank goodness for that! In a different article we talk about how this makes bike use the more efficient choice, so check that out if you're interested in efficiency. We could also talk about how burning all that fuel to move 3500 pounds of steel is effort in the physics sense, but that too is for a different article. Here, we will talk about the reason why many people think that bikes require an unreasonable effort to move. The reasons can be broken in to 3 categories, two of which we will address in some detail.
Hills, our natural enemy
You must be thinking that there's no way I can contrive an argument for how hills are not a huge pain-in-the-grass for cyclists. Here goes: Hills are a huge pain for any creature or vehicle. American motorists conquer hills so well for a few reasons:
Civil engineers have leveled most of the fast roads to more manageable inclines by burning fuel in bulldozers a long time ago.
Cars are overpowered today. In the old days, drivers had to know to shift down for hills and hit the gas.
When I drive our stick-shift Toyota Yaris in San Francisco, I shift down to stay alive.
Fuel consumption skyrockets when crossing the rockies on I-80. Truckers who still feel connected to their vehicles engines (and feel the pain of burning fuel even more intensely) feel the hills.
Automatic transmissions hide the physical facts from the car user. Modern vehicles have disconnected us from the geophysical terrain as much as industrial agriculture has torn us away from the land.
Ok, so hills are a pain for everything, but still, it's a pain you feel on a bike, right? Sure, yes, but... Most bikes sold today are a one-size-fits all bike. This is true in two ways:
Bike drivetrains are the same in Muncie, IN and in San Francisco, CA, which is absurd.
Bikes have more in common with shoes than they do with cars. You'd feel pretty bad walking a mile in a shoe 2 sizes too small or 2 sizes too large, right? Same with a bike that has gear ratios for racing on flat ground.
With a good gear ratio, hills are definitely SLOWER than flat ground, but not necessarily harder. A great video made by Cycling About explains this concept brilliantly, so I will share the link here. The summary is that, with the right gear ratio your legs spin at a comfortable rate, your do the same work you do on the flats, but understandably you move slower.
Gloves, Shoes and Bikes
The second point is that bikes need to fit the rider. Perhaps because we have thought of bikes solely as a form of occasional recreation, Americans rarely think about bike geometry. So often I see utilitarian cyclists moving about on ill-fitting Walmart bikes. I wish I could equip them all with a top of the line Surly or Soma frame, but alas I'm not that rich yet.
What is surprising, is that when it comes to cars, people don't put up with ergonomic discomfort. Consider our the material culture surrounding car interiors. Auto stores, truck stops and Amazon.com all sell a cornucopia of gizmos, gadgets and chatchkas to make sitting endless hours in a car seat more comfortable. Americans suffer from a litany of car-seat-caused injuries and diseases. From bad hips, bad backs, nerve pain in the foot to left arm skin cancer, we all carry a heavy burden of poor ergonomics and seat design. However, we do think about fixes, talk about them and sell them. Only in the bike racing world is bike geometry thought about and respected. Bike racing though, is pastime of the elite and a livelihood for a small handful of professionals. Anyone who does not belong to those groups ridicules the idea of spending time, much less money, on the right bike geometry. We can't imagine spending $3000 on a really good, well-fitting bike when Walmart has bikes for $300. When we purchase cars, however, we do the opposite, spending an extra $10,000 on x,y,z features reasoning that we drive so much that we'll benefit from the extra expenditure.
The upshot is that, when you decide to replace car miles with bike miles, you have to make informed choices about the bike geometry, drive train, and other factors. Bikes are precision tools that let you take your human capacity to incredible new heights. Because the source of power is the human body, and maybe a small electric motor, the tolerances are tight -kinda like what driving was like 100 years ago, when engines were small and transmissions manual.
Payload
The final misconception we will dispel today is one related to carrying capacity. You can carry much more with a car, no? Undoubtedly, the average passenger vehicle can move more weight and a greater volume of things than any standard road bike. But that's just part of the story. Bikes are more diverse than we realize. With the advent of e-assist cargo bike design changed significantly. Now bikes like the Urban Arrow allow bike users to carry immense loads. Adding different sorts of trailers allows bike users to move large and or bulky loads efficiently around town. European logistics companies and some US ones are capitalizing on these technological advancements to lower their logistics costs in urban centers. Bikes actually allow us mere mortals to carry vast loads at a very low cost per mile. Bikes can move about 10x their own weight in cargo. This makes them more efficient than trains or cargo ships which may carry as much as 3x their own weight.
If you're on Facebook, you might consider checking out the Carryshit olympics page. It makes patent what can be done with bikes in both everyday and extreme scenarios. The student of history might also be familiar with other times and places where the bike has proven its logistic advantages in terms of payload and speed, most notably during the Boer Wars, the Malay invasion and the Vietnam war.
Now lets consider what we move around town today. A few times a year we find that we want to move a bookshelf, a couch or refrigerator and then the real irony strikes. Cars can't do it. Pick up trucks are hard to find when you need one and worse, now their beds have shrunk from 6 feet to a paltry 4 feet.
Most of the objects humans interact with fit inside a backpack, just consider what you buy at the store. The largest items happen to be the least dense, consider a 24-pack of toilet paper. Children are likely the densest of the "packages" that we move about town -made of water, bone, and muscle. Thankfully, kids love cargo bikes and starting about age 10 are self-propelled (or were in past generations).
Perhaps the biggest reason people assume that one needa a car to carry groceries home is the fact the the average bike we're familiar with was made for racing or is poorly-built, ill equipped Walmart bike. Bikes, being precision tools, need to properly kitted out to carry the vast assortment of items we move from the store to the home, from home to school, and around town. Here is where people understably run into trouble. It takes some product knowledge to get the right stuff to carry groceries home. By contrast, it's easy to put groceries on the rear seat (the trunk's full of stuff you don't use). With a little help at the start and a teeny bit of practice anyone can save thousands of dollars a year shopping, commuting and moving kids around with a bike. The bike is not the best solution for moving refrigerators or granite blocks, but it's perfect for most of the logistics tasks that we carry out around town. Remember that most car trips made in American are made within 6 miles from home!
Conclusion
When choosing to convert car miles to bike miles, you will undoubtedly find surprising logistics obstacles. Carrying a foam-core board on bike is suprisingly hard despite being so light. Any change worth making is never easy or straight forward. There'll be a learning curve. We're here to help you choose the right bike, the right pannier (saddle bag) the right trailer to handle the logistics challenges you face. Reach out if you'd like to get some help in living cheaper and greener.
Also reach out if you would like help us help others.
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