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109 comments on What is a Human Being Worth (in Terms of Energy)?
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Our family fleet:
Two military style bicycles, one travel/city bike. Combined annual mileage 10,000km. Oil usage: half a can of lubricant per annum.
No toeclips? You’re wasting a whole bunch of efficiency there. By using your upstroke you can gain much more power. I don’t believe safety is an issue - I’ve used them for over forty years on the streets of Chicago and can get out of them very quickly. I won’t, however, use clipless pedals such as Looks on the street. Difficult to get used to, require special shoes (try waling a long way in them when you have a flat), and in one instance I found them gone when I came out to ride my bike back home. Nice fleet. Wish my digital camera hadn’t crapped out a couple of months back I could post mine.
Power, maybe. Efficiency, no. You use energy when pulling the pedal up with your leg, energy you wouldn't otherwise use if you were just coasting with it on the up swing. Not knowing anything about anatomy and muscular dynamics, but it might actually be less efficient since the muscles in the human leg aren't meant to pull up loads other than its own weight under any evolutionary circumstances.
Anyway I use the heavy military bicycles to offset my otherwise sedentary lifestyle, so maximizing efficiency would mean I wouldn't get the same exercise as before. In fact I don't understand some cyclists with their over thousand euro super bikes with gazillion gears and carbon fiber frames. Surely if you want to get fit and be 'sporty' you should pick the heaviest bicycle you can possible peddle with? And the speeds they reach begin to be quite dangerous, at least to other cyclists. And if they want efficiency they should stick with speeds under 25km/h since above that you actually waste most of your pedaling effort into forcing air out of your way.
I didn't buy my bike to get fit. I bought it as a cheap and relatively environmentally friendly mode of transport (which also allows me to drink a couple more beers than if I was driving). For me, getting fit is just a welcome side effect.
Not that I have some sort of super bike - mine cost me £40 and has a steel frame.
Where you gain efficiency is in a smoother stroke, enabling you to maintain a spin in the 80 - 100 rpm range, very difficult to do with a free pedal. This is why the Biopace gears went out of favor, they destroyed smoothness. I used to be a gear pusher way back and experienced hurt knees, muscle imbalances, etc. This is also the reason for multiple gears to stay in an .efficient rpm range. I do have a single speed fixed gear bike when I’m in the mood to punish myself. I’m sorry, I just don’t get the mentality of a heavier bike, especially if I’m coming back from a tip against an unexpected headwind. Whatever rocks your boat. Everybody makes love to their old lady (man) different.
I haven't seen the likes of the military style bikes. I presume they have traded off weight and efficiency for robustness and reliability. It looks like they have 1.5 to 2 times as many sokes, so I suppose you could carry a very heavy load without damaging the bicycle.
Toe clips do help, the amount of extra muscles recruited are at the discretion of the rider. I used to do tons of mountain biking, on ridiculously rocky terrain, I never was unable to get out of clips when falling off. But not being clipped in, and you are likely to lose control as your feet are bounced off the peddels. At high output levels, toe clips allow you to generate more power, or less leg strain at a fixed power level. Clipins are slightly more effcient than clips, but I never mastered getting out of them -especially if I tried to stay upright until the last possible half second.
The hard core "trials riders" didn't use clips, but instead used platform pedals. They could do amazing things with their undersized bicycles. But trials setups would be horribly inefficient to ride for any sort of distance.