Originally Posted by
I-Like-To-Bike
For arguments sake - How much do you estimate it would cost someone to hire 26 or so people and rent/buy all that equipment to make a local move like that? Vice renting a truck for a couple hours and 2 or 3 people to do the lifting. Fun factor, camaraderie, group hugging and pizza party afterwards are factors to be disregarded; just economics and utility please.
Economics is more complex than you make out. In a sense all human transactions are economic. If those cyclists appreciated the exercise and would have been out riding anyway, their labour costs do not have to be accounted for. Furthermore, the event could be written off as an investment in research and development, into alternate models of utility transportation.
Originally Posted by
Cyclaholic
What currency do you want to estimate it in? it's pretty easy to work it out in dollars but the currency that matters to me is the environmental costs because it's the hardest debt to repay and the one that will get passed on to my kids.
On the other hand, where it may break down is the hidden environmental cost of the caloric inputs. In modern agriculture, food production requires a lot of fossil fuel input. Thus the cyclists expending extra energy towing huge loads of furniture and having to make up the calories, may paradoxically have used more fossil fuel than one moving truck, although we would need a detailed analysis to determine that. Of course, if and when we move to a model of truly sustainable agriculture, the bike will win.