Originally Posted by cooker
You're ight that multiple complex variables come into play. For example, it you are commited to bike transportation you're likely to plan to live close to work and shops.
If you are out of shape and start biking for fitness, you may end up living longer, and as Professor
Ulrich points out, that may actually lead to
greater lifetime energy consumption, because only a small part of our daily power usage is for transport, but if you combine it with other environmentally sound choices you can counteract that unintended consequence.
Thanks for the interesting link.
We car free people do better than figure 1 shows.
From the article:
" I assume that an individual owns an automobile whether using a bicycle for transportation or not, and so the automotive energy consumption does not account for the energy required to manufacture the vehicle, which is typically about 10 percent of the energy consumed over the life of the vehicle."