I've seen a wide variety of calculations on this so no one has convinced me yet that walking or biking relatively short distances is better than using an automobile, especially for an individual.

The main impact is that we live more locally and travel much shorter distances when we are limited to walk or bike as our main transportation on an everyday basis.

Relocalization is not about efficiency as we understand it today - it's about long term sustainability, self-sufficiency and durability of local systems supplying "needs" instead of trying to cater to every "want".

Just because the milk is slightly cheaper to buy in the store than the cost of caring for your own cow, does not mean you should necessarily sell/kill the cow. What if the price goes up tomorrow? - you are stuck with buying the milk. What if milk stops arriving in a store nearby?

Having local communities that are resilient and self sufficient on the basics makes sense. It also helps make sure that the goods we buy are produced within our democratically agreed system of environmental, health, labor, safety and other regulations.

I've heard this argument before, and I think it's nonsense. Having become a bicycle commuter this year (15 miles round trip), I can tell you that I am not eating any more than I was before. I've lost some weight, sure, but I had some extra to lose, as does the rest of America. I feel better than I have in a long time. I do realize that our food-producing system is too energy-intensive, but I find it very hard to believe that moving around 3,000 lbs. of steel + 160 lbs. of human could generally use less energy than moving 30 lbs. of steel + 160 lbs of human. I did see one article making the same argument as yours, which assumed the cyclist eating only beef, clearly the worst case scenario.

How about the pullution factor?

How about toll on our health and health costs our dependence on car-crazy infrastructure has presented?

I firmly believe that bicycles are the best tool we have to help mitigate peak oil. I understand that making them uses energy, etc.. but I believe we have plenty that could be put to use and have a major impact right now, sitting underused in our garages. I'd love to see a revival in local bicyle shops to help get them back up and running well. Hopefully they will start to replace the automobile slum we live in now.

The problem is getting America off its ass and out of the frame of mind that all transportation has to be done with a car.

Christ, some of my neighbors drive past their driveways to their mailboxes, even though the mailboxes are about 30 feet from where they park.

We've become ridiculous.

I think AlanFromBigEasy's point about Switzerland in WWII disproves this theory. With walking, cycling and trains etc, they used 1/400th the amount of oil per capita as Americans do now, still with a decent Western style of living.

Looks like a troll post to me :-)

At some point doesn't walking or biking use just as much oil? more miles walked and biked mean eating more calories and it takes a lot of gasoline to grow and transport food, correct?.

Your analysis is off in just where the energy savings are for driving everywhere.

Driving everywhere promotes obesity (see skyrocketing rates in the USA). Obesity means less sex. Less sex leads to fewer children. BIG SAVINGS !

The other savings from driving everywhere is more cardiac disease, strokes and diabetes which lead to disability (minor energy savings by not driving to work, or driving at all) and early death (another large energy savings).

So bicycling and walking saves energy immediately, but these savings may later be negated by longer lives and more children in the long run,

Best Hopes for Increased Morbidity among Hummer Drivers,

Alan

Transmogrifier over at the Transmogrified blog has calculated the fossil-fuel inputs of the energy required to ride a bike and converted them to an mpg-equivalent. His calculations put a vegetarian bicyclist at 196 mpg, a lacto-ovo cyclist at 142 mpg and a meat-eating cyclist at 104 mpg. Full calculations here:

http://constructal.blogspot.com/2006/03/whats-mileage-on-that-bicycle.html

Tranmogrifier's estimates are actually a bit understated as they do not net out base-rate calories consumed sitting behind the wheel of a car. Nor does he deal with the energy inputs involved in building a 3,500 lb. car versus a 30 lb. bike or the energy inputs into the infrastructure required for a car versus a bike, or the energy required to mitigate the car's carbon emissions and pollutants, and on and on . . .

Walking requires about three times the energy of biking, so even then, a meat-eating walker gets mileage as good as your average hybrid.

Bottom line: Eating local from behind the wheel of Hummer ain't gonna save the planet.

You need to learn something about just how much energy there is in oil, and how wastefully it's used.

Have a look at one or more of,
Food, Land, Population and the U.S. Economy, Pimentel, David and Giampietro, Mario. ]
Carrying Capacity Network, 11/21/1994, tells us that in food production is involved 400gal per capita annually
and http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html; http://www.ers.usda.gov/AmberWaves/November05/Findings/USFoodConsumption..., both tell us 1,950lbs food consumed per person annually

So each 1lb of food requires 400/1,950 = 0.21 gallons of "gasoline" as you lot call it.

- There are 31,000kcal in a gallon of petrol (as we call it), and so those 0.21gal required to make 1lb of grain are 6,500kcal. 0.21gal of gasoline burned would drive your 25mpg car just over 5 miles.
- 1lb of grain gives about 1,600kcal. As this energy calculator tells us, a cyclist weighing an average 160lbs, going at a relatively stately 12 miles per hour for three hours, covering 36 miles, will burn 1,533 kcal - equivalent to that pound of grain consumed.
- or that same person could walk at a slow 3mph for 7 hours covering 21 miles and burning 1,676kcal.

So you can use the oil to help grow grain and travel on your bike for 36 miles in 3hours, or walk 21 miles in 7 hours, or put the oil directly in your car and travel 5 miles in 10 minutes.

Put another way, a gallon of oil will get you 25 miles in a car, or if devoted to helping food production, get you 110 miles on foot or 180 miles on a bicycle.

Thus, at no point does biking or walking use just as much oil as does driving. Driving's just quicker - but the price of that speed is a huge use of energy per distance travelled.

Of course it's also possible to grow grain using no oil at all. Billions of people have done it for thousands of years. Driving a modern car without oil is a little trickier.

Given the high degree of obesity in the United States, most of us would have a long way to go before we would "need" any additional food to fuel our additional exercise. When I see the video, and I see all those happy, smiling, fit people enjoying the day and then when I think of the horrors that the auto is visiting on this planet, I have trouble seeing how this could not be a great improvement over auto dominance as usual. In any event, please provide hard numbers in the future rather than just positing abstract theory.

So, in order for us to fight global warming, we need to make sure that China grows its automobile base?

This post and discussion shows how blind some people are about efficiency and sustainability...

First, the notion that a biker spends more energy because of his activity, rather than driving a car, is obviously a stupid thing to say. For one, you would spend the same amount of energy that a biker does anyway, because a driver still has to eat, and make some exercise if wants to be in good health. Net effect is ZERO, as someone up here pointed out correctly. The problem is even worse, as driving have rendered people obese and unfit, with great dangers for health, stress and mental diseases, enlarging health expenses by a lot. For this sake only, I'd say that the net effect would even be negative.

But common sense would suffice. A bike is somewhat lighter than a hummer (hmmmm!) I'd say! The waste in energy in cars is astoundingly stupid. And for evidence, I'd point out a question: why have people in China and poor cities overall, have used bikes as transport for several decades now if it was as expensive as using it on cars? How it didn't show off in the oil consumption charts per capita? The answer is also boringly obvious.

So stop trolling. I can admit you questioned this with sincerity, but honestly, I can tell you that you didn't with your head in the right place.

I have one medicine for you, though. Get a bike.