
Walking consumes more gasoline than driving - maxerickson
http://ideas.4brad.com/holy-cow-walking-consumes-more-gasoline-driving
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akgerber
This article's final point should probably be on top: "Many people take this
idea as a condemnation of cycling or exercise. It isn’t. Cycling is my
favourite exercise. It is a condemnation of how much fossil fuel is used in
agriculture."

People travel smaller distances in neighborhoods and cities designed around
walking, biking, and mass transit (in the US, mostly pre-WWII neighborhoods)
than in places designed around cars, because roads and parking lots require
huge amounts of land, and high-speed automobile travel also enables people to
live on larger plots of land. Don't let this kind of reasoning dissuade you
from living in, and supporting the construction of, walkable neighborhoods.

~~~
bdamm
The reasoning isn't dissuading me, it's the cost of living in urban cores (for
property) while facing a high probability of my wife or child getting raped or
mugged that does.

That, combined with tax incentives for owning property, means I have finally
given up my walkable neighborhoods and have embraced the carbon powered
lifestyle. A few years ago I'd be the last person who would say that, I
protested against highway expansion and pushed for bicycle infrastructure. Now
I've given it all up, have moved out into the weeds, and pay the carbon lords
prodigious amounts of cash.

If you want walkable, you have to give up nearly everything else and you
better love spending all your time in that walkable little neighborhood. I
couldn't do it, there's nowhere in a dirty city I want to be badly enough to
give up everything else for.

~~~
scottkduncan
Keep in mind that fatal car accidents still far outweigh homicides and that
sexual assault - whether you are in suburbs or the cities - are far more
likely to be perpetrated by acquaintances than strangers lurking in alleys.

~~~
bdamm
Fair enough. The point I was really going for was that affordable housing in
high-density cores typically mean that you're in a "gentrifying" if not
outright hostile neighborhood. When I had a child I quickly decided I wanted
to let him play outside - and I can't teach a toddler the difference between a
junkie and a postman.

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thinkpad20
I didn't give the article a super-close read, but it seems to assume that
people eat proportionately to how much they walk/exercise. Looking around,
that seems unlikely to be the case.

~~~
bunderbunder
It also assumes that walkers and drivers cover the same distance. I don't
think that's remotely true. For example I know people who think nothing of
driving ten or more miles in order to buy groceries from the trendy grocery
store (often, ironically enough, a Whole Foods) instead of the one that's less
than a mile from home. Same for bars and restaurants.

~~~
x1798DE
I don't see how that's relevant. If it were true that driving is more energy
efficient than walking, then if all you cared about was energy efficiency,
you'd prefer to drive the shorter distance, assuming the result holds even
when driving short distances (which it very well may). (Though the author of
the article is suggesting instead that you may want to somehow increase the
energy efficiency of walking by more efficiently producing food.)

~~~
bunderbunder
You might prefer to drive the shorter distance, but that's not a realistic
option. Car-centric infrastructure tends to take up a lot of space. The wide
multi-lane streets and seas of parking lots you get in communities where
driving is the primary mode of transportation massively increase the amount of
land area needed to provide the same amount of services, which in turn greatly
increases the actual distance being covered. Last time I lived in the 'burbs,
the nearest grocery store was 5 miles away, and accessible only by roads with
speed limits of 45mph+. Walking or riding a bike to buy a loaf of bread simply
wasn't an option.

Whereas part of the reason why it's common for people to not own cars (or own
fewer than one car per adult household member) in more walkable communities is
that it's simply not practical - cars take up a lot of space that can't be
used for other things, and making a community dense enough to permit easy
walkability doesn't leave a lot of space left over the swaths of 200 square
feet that it takes to temporarily store a car that isn't currently being
driven. So the laws of supply and demand place those spaces at a premium.

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dllthomas
_" [P]eople who eat the average diet that they can’t claim their human-powered
travel as good for the planet — just good for them."_

Unless they were going to do comparable exercise anyway. Biking to work is
unequivocally a win over driving to work and after an hour on a stationary
bike.

~~~
wutbrodo
Not to mention the fact that this conclusion makes no sense when you consider
the fact that one's appetite (and the associated gasoline use of the required
food) doesn't increase 1:1 with how many extra calories one burned. This
assumes no changes at all in how efficiently your body uses energy and how
much energy your body stores on it (in the form of fat).

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mrfusion
If people walk regularly they get health benefits. To be accurate this should
take into account the energy savings from avoiding healthcare costs. E.g., how
much gasoline goes into building an additional hospital, pills, etc?

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cperciva
_Transit systems, on average, are only mildly greener than cars. City buses,
in fact, use the same energy per passenger mile as typical cars. Light rail is
sometimes 2 and rarely even 3 times better than cars, but in some cities like
San Jose, it uses almost twice as much energy per actual passenger than
passenger cars do.._

This would be true if buses and light rail all ran on gasoline, but many
don't. In Vancouver, the light rail system is entirely electric, as are about
1/3 of the buses.

~~~
lazyant
Electrical cars/buses may be less green than gas vehicles since electricity
may come from a very "dirty" source. For example in the US more than 1/3 of
the energy comes from coal power plants, which surely have caused more cancer
deaths than all nuclear accidents put together [citation needed]

~~~
arcadius
It certainly depends on where you are. In Seattle, we get 90% of our power
from hydroelectric, and almost all of the remaining 10% from either nuclear or
wind. I wonder what the comparison between cities with electric transportation
services and without, and their respective power supplies would show.

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lauradhamilton
Headline seems to be contradicted by the article. If we get the equivalent of
42mpg walking -- and we assume that people are walking downtown in large
cities where there is a lot of traffic -- that's far better gas mileage than a
car gets. (It can take 10 minutes to go 1 mile in a car downtown.)

Although maybe if you ate a diet of 100% beef and only walked along highways
going 55mph walking would be less efficient...

~~~
x1798DE
Dubious reasoning there, but I think the headline is based on the next
paragraph, which explains that a Prius gets better than 42 mpg, and 2 or more
people in a normal car that gets better than 21 mpg alone gets better than 42
passenger-miles per gallon.

~~~
001sky
The capital investment to produce the car uses energy--so no, I highly doubt
this math. The cow is a capital investment like the car (ie, and energy sink
that makes other things happen with less energy). If the cow alows you to not
buy a car, you are doing better off perhaps?

The appropriate analysis is to look at the entire investment in the car-
infrasctucture-industrial complex:

Roads

Gas Stations

Auto supply stores

Tool makers

Auto Companies

Auto Parts Suppliers

Shipping Industry that transports the cars

etc.

~~~
maxerickson
I think it is legitimate to consider the incremental impacts of the choices we
make, the starting line for those choices is what exists today.

Trying to do it within a clear context is a good idea though.

~~~
001sky
Even at this low level, the analysis is false. Walking consumes no gas. This
is why you cannot arbitrarily pick an incongruent levels of abstraction. The
entire premis of gas_equivalent_calories is flawed, then, unless we take steps
to apply it correctly.

~~~
rosser
The _physical act_ of walking, itself, consumes no gas, sure.

 _That 's not the point._ The point is to be mindful of where the calories
you're burning came from. And if you're in the developed world, with
industrial agriculture, then your food is almost certainly steeped in
petrochemicals.

~~~
001sky
_food is almost certainly steeped in petrochemicals._

So is automobile production. So the analysis is flawed.

Which is fine, but it's also _false_ once corrected for capital intesity (and
depreciation).

So the result is lame. It is not counter-intuitive or even...interesting. But
YMMV.

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mrfusion
I think this doesn't take into account that most people have surplus calories
that would otherwise turn into fat.

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revelation
Three miles of walking does not burn an _extra_ 220 calories.

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DanBC
> We eat, on average about 2700 Calories/day in the USA

Does anyone have a reliable cite for this please? It feels a bit high. Does it
include children and old people?

~~~
pixl97
[http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-calorie-intake-
human...](http://healthyeating.sfgate.com/average-calorie-intake-human-per-
day-versus-recommendation-1867.html)

2800 is the high end of the scale. 2500 would be an average for males.

~~~
DanBC
That's a cite for what people should eat.

I am asking for a cite to support the statement "we eat on average 2700
calories per day".

That link has some self reported studies, and also explains the problems with
those studies (very few people know how much they eat).

It also meantions that women eat less calories than men - about 2,000.

