bicycle fuel economy

My friend Annie sent me a link to a t-shirt design today that had a bike positioned above a sign on a gas pump that read "fuel economy information" and then had, City [infinity sign] and Highway [infinity sign] to the left and right of it.

I also have a sticker on my bike helmet that reads "I get 1000 miles/gallon and I don't pollute" (placed on the left side of the helmet so that it faces drivers and makes them mad/think, should they happen to read it).

I enjoy the sentiment in both of these designs, but neither of them are actually true. Certainly not the first one. But the second one is probably still pretty outrageous. Sure, there's absolutely zero gallons of fuel going directly towards powering the bike. But there's the fuel that went into manufacturing, shipping, and selling the bike, of course. And the oil that goes into maintaining the roads that the bike rolls so smoothly over. But more than that, oil still fuels that bike, just indirectly. Because oil fuels me.

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No, I'm not a robot. I eat regular old civilized human food like everyone else. But that's the stuff I'm talking about. Here's an article, the oil in your oatmeal, that explains what I'm getting at. More fossil fuels go into the growing, shipping, preserving, and preparing of your food than you would think. According to the article's sources, 7 calories of fossil fuel energy goes toward bringing you 1 calorie of food energy.

I'm certainly not knocking bikes. But unless they're eating organic food that they grew (or otherwise gathered) themselves and preserved and cooked it without fossil fuels, the environmentalists are fooling themselves to think that bikes are not powered by oil.

I wonder how far off the sticker I have on my helmet is. The article says that 8 ounces of oil go into the breakfast described, and that over 2 quarts are consumed with that breakfast routine over the course of a week. So let's keep the amount of oil per meal constant and triple it for a week to cover all my meals (6 quarts, which is already a gallon and a half, for 21 meals of fuel, er, I mean food). That means for my sticker to be true, I'd have to be able to ride an average of 71 miles after each of the 14 meals that add up to one gallon of fuel. I know my calculations miss the mark some in how the food is actually divvied up to power the bike, but 1000 miles per "gallon" is not going to happen. Oh well.

Tags:

• bicycle
• food