'Humans Riding Bikes Are More Energy-Efficient Than Any Other Animal On The Planet'

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"Forget about your dumb Toyota Prius, the king of transportation efficiency was invented in 1885 and it runs on whatever you had for breakfast. According to Scientific American's newly updated report, based on consumption of calories to transport one gram of mass one kilometer, the most efficient mode of transport on the planet is a human riding a bicycle. Using simple mechanical systems to augment our weird bipedal human body's ability to move more efficiently, bikes make us significantly more efficient than even the most agile swimming salmon or floating bird. We kinda knocked it out of the park with bikes, didn't we?"

"The two main expenses of energy while traveling are gravity and forward motion, and biking all but eliminates the force needed to fight both. By putting humans in a sitting position and letting the bike take the forces of gravity, the only effort we really spend fighting gravity is when we come to a hill. Similarly, by transmitting our leg force to wheels and bearings, we roll with much lower friction. The bike also allows us to coast, something legs simply don't do. Until Horses develop their own way to use wheels and bearings, I think we're safe at the top of the efficiency pyramid."

" 'They [bicycles] turn humans into this hyper-efficient terrestrial locomotor because they make being on land more like swimming,' Tyson Hedrick, a comparative physiologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill told Scientific American."

"In fact, the only way to make humans move farther and faster on the same caloric expenditure is to wrap a bicycle in a more aerodynamic package, like a velomobile, to fight the wind resistance as well. This, SciAm mentions, gives humans an 'aquatic efficiency' like we're swimming on land, and I think that's pretty cool."

Continued at link:

https://www.jalopnik.com/2110961/humans-riding-bikes-more-energy-efficient-than-animals/