cross-posted from: https://aussie.zone/post/34370513
Anon likes bikes
this post was submitted on 07 Jul 2026
468 points (98.5% liked)
Fuck Cars
16106 readers
730 users here now
A place to discuss problems of car centric infrastructure or how it hurts us all. Let's explore the bad world of Cars!
Rules
1. Be Civil
You may not agree on ideas, but please do not be needlessly rude or insulting to other people in this community.
2. No hate speech
Don't discriminate or disparage people on the basis of sex, gender, race, ethnicity, nationality, religion, or sexuality.
3. Don't harass people
Don't follow people you disagree with into multiple threads or into PMs to insult, disparage, or otherwise attack them. And certainly don't doxx any non-public figures.
4. Stay on topic
This community is about cars, their externalities in society, car-dependency, and solutions to these.
5. No reposts
Do not repost content that has already been posted in this community.
Moderator discretion will be used to judge reports with regard to the above rules.
Posting Guidelines
In the absence of a flair system on lemmy yet, let’s try to make it easier to scan through posts by type in here by using tags:
- [meta] for discussions/suggestions about this community itself
- [article] for news articles
- [blog] for any blog-style content
- [video] for video resources
- [academic] for academic studies and sources
- [discussion] for text post questions, rants, and/or discussions
- [meme] for memes
- [image] for any non-meme images
- [misc] for anything that doesn’t fall cleanly into any of the other categories
Recommended communities:
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
I recently saw a scatter plot somewhere, I believe it was ~~speed vs energy efficiency or something~~ body weight vs cost of transport. And all animals, as well as most modes of transport follow a roughly anti-proportional relationship on a log-scale. ~~If you're fast heavy, you use a lot of energy.~~ If I remember it right, the ~~fastest~~ most efficient animal was the salmon ~~(?)~~. There was one single outlier from that trend, an animal that is much ~~too fast and much~~ too efficient for its weight ~~at the same time~~: Human on a bike.
Edit: Found it: https://slowrevealgraphs.com/2025/12/31/a-human-on-a-bicycle-is-among-the-most-efficient-forms-of-travel/
Too bad trains and boats are missing from the graph.
I agree. To my surprise, human on a bike still seems to win out, though:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File%3AEffizienzLeistungFahrzeuge.png
From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_efficiency_in_transport
That is interesting! Looks like that table is for passenger transport specifically, not energy per mass. People don't pack nearly as densly in transport as heavy cargo does. Not safely and willingly anyway.
There's also a table in that Wikipedia article that breaks it down for a few real world train services with percent capacity ranging from 27 to 65% (in different networks / on different trains, though). But yeah, humans like their personal space, even in trains, those wasteful brats.
What if we gave a salmon a bike
Then we could judge a fish on it's ability to ride a bike.