50 miles on a pint of peanut oil

When I was a kid my Dad would bring comic books home.  My favorite involved the Donald Duck series character Gyro Gearloose.  Gryo was a brilliant semi-failed inventor for hire with offbeat ideas that I loved.  I wanted to be Gyro when I grew up - I even pestered my parents for round glasses (I didn't get them)One was a flying scooter that got 50 miles to a pint of peanut oil.  A flying scooter was a neat idea, but the number stuck with me - 400 miles per gallon.  

 

At the time the family car was a very inefficient station wagon that got about 12 or 13 miles per gallon in highway driving.  It would be replaced by a very light Ford Falcon that reached the then almost unimaginable 20 mile per gallon level.  About the same time I got my first real bicycle - a three speed "English Racer" from Raleigh.  It was used, but Mrs Isler at Isler's Bicycle refurbished second hand bikes in addition to selling new Schwinns and Raleighs that were beyond my means. 

 

The black Raleigh lasted a few years before I need to move on.  I took care of it, but it was used at least nine months out of the year and was showing its age.  That and consumer bike tech was changing. I'd go down the Isler's and drool.  Sting Rays and then ten speeds.  She had a derailleur mechanism set up that you could hand crank and physically feel the effect of using different gears.  In ninth grade I finally got a bright blue Schwinn ten speed.  Five hundred dollars in today's money -not the top of the line, but still and object of desire.  It took longer, but I wore it out too - the rocket assist experiments probably didn't help much.

 

Bikes were becoming a thing nationally.  I started college at the University of Utah.  There were at least three bike shops in nearby, bike racks everywhere on campus and at least a half dozen sheds with compressed air and tools for quick bike repairs.    Later I moved to Pasadena and found bikes everywhere at Caltech too..  I moved on to a hand built Raleigh Professional which is still a thing of beauty.  In fact they were on the rise across the US and in Northern Europe. The second great bicycle revolution was underway.

 

The first came with the invention of the safety bike.  Starting around 1890 bicycles came on the scene in large numbers.  Roads were built and a manufacturing industry was born.  The boom lasted about twenty years.  Kids still used bikes, but the automobile was becoming practical and large sums  were going into automotive infrastructure.  Bike makers moved into automobiles and airplanes.

 

The second boom was sparked by better tires and inexpensive and reliable gearing systems - at least on the technical side.  The social and infrastructure components were more complex and interesting.  Sort of book length interesting so I'll give the abridged version:

 

 Denmark and the Netherlands saw cycling as important for very different reasons, but supported it with policy and infrastructure.  Public acceptance was slow, but by the 90s both countries had  successfully integrated cycling into their transportation systems. The boom in the US and UK died.  Cycling in the US survived as a recreational sport with a very small and very male portion of the population.  Children still learned how to ride bikes, but the movement of controlling the activities of children killed the the notion of using them for transportation.  Bike racks disappeared from schools and many considered bikes dangerous.

 

We're beginning to what some - Horace Dediu and I are in the camp - would consider a third revolution.¹  This one is a bit different.  It's concerned with efficiency.  How do you move someone around efficiently?  The answers are complex and involve far more than just the vehicle, although aspects of the vehicle suggest pathway.  You may have a thirty minute commute - that's pretty standard and has been for decades..  people often live in places that give them thirty to sixty minutes of commuting.  The percentage of commutes longer rapidly drops at longer commutes.  The day only has so many hours.  One the other hand an analysis of most trips shows a number of smaller trips are very common.   Anything under about four or five miles is rich bicycle territory.  Why use a car?

 

Let's take a diversion and talk about efficiency. .  Electric drive trains are much more efficient than the best internal combustion drive trains ..  about three times as efficient (nearly three quarters of the gas you buy heats up your engine block and that won't get much better).  Electrics are efficient, batteries are dropping in price and charging infrastructure is improving.  Sweet - but the vehicle is still a car.  One and a half to two tons hauling around one person and a few groceries.   Something is broken.

 

Here's were something like a bike comes back in.  A few years ago and friend and I measured her efficiency on a bike.  We measured how many Joules she "burned"to go a fixed distance and converted it into MPG_e - miles per gallon equivalent.²    

 

She got slightly over 1,000 MPG_e at about 13 miles per hour on flat ground.  She's very tall and her coefficient of drag in the upright position is - well - not good.  In a racing position she's probably be over 1,100 MPG_e. 

here's a little conversion table

 

1 MPG_e ~ 0.013km/MJ

                   0.0478 km/kWh

                   1 mi/33.7 kWh

                   0.0297 mi/kWh

 

so convert away...

 

It varies with formulation, but MPG_e assumes a gallon of gasoline has about 33.7 kilowatt hours of energy.  It also happens to be very close to the energy density of diesel fuel and  - well  - peanut oil.  So if she was drinking peanut oil, she'd be well over Gyro's number.   If she had something like Ben and Jerry's she'd be closer to 300 MPG_b&j..  and that seems a bit more fun.

 

Riding a bike is terrific exercise, but it may be too much if you have hills, longer distances or not much time.  This is where a human-electric hybrid comes in (they go by several names).  Normal riding on a bike uses about 100 watts of muscle power.  With an ebike you still supply muscle power , but an electric motor augments your pedaling with 25 to several hundred watts depending on your taste.  You're still getting exercise, but now you're producing power on the order of a Tour rider or better.  You have become superman or superwoman.  The feeling is quite amazing.

 

I built one in the mid 80s trying to crack 2,000 MPG_e ..  It was a primitive hack, but I managed 2,300 MPGe.  A good ebike starts at about $3,000 and go up, but large scale production would dramatically drop the price.  

 

I'm skipping over a lot, but you need infrastructure and a cultural acceptance to make cycling part of an efficient transport system.  Outside of a few regions I'm not sure how successfully those issues can be addressed in the US, but much of the rest of the world is ripe.  And in the US some small cities (say under 100,000 population) and suburbs may be fertile ground for female riders... people who want transportation rather than a toys.³  That means moving something besides themselves.  This is where an ebike can shine, but the design diverges from what one normally thinks about.    A friend who is heavily into bikes as transportation in a Denver suburb sent this link of her new "crossover" - a practical electric cargo bike designed with women in mind.  

 

There are so many other aspects to this, but pencils down - my hour's up.

 __________

¹ Horace is a very clear thinker.  You really should follow him ..  he's also at Asymco. 

² It's only meaningful in the US as most people here think in terms of miles per gallon rather than something like liters per hundred kilometers... they're measuring the same thing, but I'll use MPG_e. When I'm doing physics I'm usually in joules or electron volts.  If it's human scale energy, I usually use watt-hours.  Whatever is convenient. 

³ Women are bicycling's indicator species

 

 Derailleur