traingang

yeah nailed it. vegan acoustic biker clears every other mode of transport but otherwise burning a lot of oil might net you more energy than converting meat, cheese and eggs through a human.

fuck the cArBoN fOoTpRiNt narrative to begin with and kill some BP executives in self-defense instead; but in addition to food calories stats like this should include "but are you actually using it though?" like how the "failure rate" of condoms as a bc method includes forgetting the condom.

a push bike you ride less often because of time, wind, hills, or workplace hygiene isn't better than an e-bike that replaces more car trips

I think it is most likely assuming people are going to be consuming extra calories. I'm sure most people have enough calories already.

I am a machine that converts beans into food related emissions.

You could argue that the increased energy burn from cycling is offset by not needing exercise elsewhere. Cos like people gotta exercise but if your transport is exercising then two birds one stone right? If you use an ebike and go to gym after that isn’t saving on my fart related emissions

I have a pretty hard time buying the claim that breathing is more than twice as impactful as producing a lithium ion battery and my job is literally calculating emissions.

Maybe they're including the extra laundry and showers from getting all sweaty? Or does manufacturing Lycra use a lot of fossil fuels?

I think it probably accounts for "likelihood of use within a distance" where the average person is likely to use an E-Bike for a 30 minutes ride but not a bike. So the regular bike only decreases your impact within a like 15 minute radius of travel.

So as an individual it would always be best to stretch the distances you go as far as possible with the least consuming mode, but as a population, the E-Bike prevents more driving/bus riding/ horse riding (?) than a bike does.

For me, it was a couple things:

1. it made hills way easier
2. it tripled the range I would normally have the time or willingness to go for any given trip

I simply do more with it than I used to when I just had a regular bike.

Regular bikes are definitely not obsolete or anything. In an area where it's quite flat and there's a lot of density and transit options, I think a regular bike is a better option. And ebikes are very heavy, so they're not really an option if you're in an apartment and have to carry it up and down stairs every day.

These kinds of system analyses are extremely sensitive to system boundary definitions. As mentioned in another comment, the only things they accounted for were "food", charging electricity, and manufacturing. You burn more calories when cycling so they put in some estimate of the carbon footprint of diet.

Of course, they didn't know what cyclists eat so it's just some average cribbed from some other system analysis. If you're a Bean Head then the number will be much lower. Same for if you fuel with sugar when riding or just do vegan protein powder, etc.

But more importantly they didn't factor in what it means to regularly exercise that much. If a person is doing that they are going to improve their overall health substantially, live a better life, use healthcare less, and so on. No carbon footprint info was calculated for this because of the system boundaries, but of course all of these things are connected. By the logic of this system, the best form of transportation is sitting on the couch.

Ova here*

there's a german blogpost I cant be arsed to translate but it does come out on top of everything, including walking

But what about a riding an ebike that's charged solely by renewable energy?

I'll point toward my infographic here to show that the squabble between increased tyre consumption between E-Bikes and Acoustic bikes is akin to considering whether oat or wheat gruel is more ecologically sustainable while the majority of your peers sustain a diet of wagyu

It sounds like you're just putting the kilometers on the tires at different rates. Likely, if they're identical tires, you're getting close to the same distances out of them. The difference between them would be that the ebike is slightly heavier and it has more power to the wheel. So there is more scrubbing. But I don't expect it would be much more, because you're also probably running higher air pressure in the ebike tires.

at least make it a horse pulled wagon, cmon

you can put olympic sprinter level power down on an e-bike to get massive ass. It kind of begs the question as to why you'd get an e-bike in the first place but you could

I have not looked into the specifics of this shitpost but how otherwise would a bus fare better than a regular car