Bicycles are faster than cars

In the early 1970s Ivan Illich wrote
The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour.

My Raleigh Oakland a cheap hybrid

So a bike is a lot faster than a car when you measure all the time required to keep a car going. I ride a 15 kg cheap steel hybrid bike and over level ground, for a sustained period I can get three times the speed of a car on my bike. Over a short journey I can do four times this speed.

Even with a full touring load of 15 kg I can do twice the speed of a car and cover 80 miles a day. And I am almost 50 years old, when I was in my twenties I could cover more than 100 miles a day cycle touring.

If you do most of your driving in a city then the real speed you achieve with your car is probably a lot less than 5 mph. A bike also allows door to door travel, no driving round town looking for parking or walking to the final destination. No sitting in traffic jams. In cities nothing beats the bike for speed.

I bought my Raleigh Oakland in the June for 300 euro, since then I’ve spent about 50 euros on spares and maybe three or four hours servicing and I have done over 3000 miles on it. It will cost about 100 euros in servicing costs to do 6000 miles a year and keep the bike road worthy. I will be doing all own servicing, if I was to pay someone else to service the bike the cost will at least double. But that would still only be 200 euros a year.

A very high percentage of car journeys are under five miles, an ideal distance for the bike. This kind of short car journey with a cold engine uses a lot of fuel and results in a lot of engine wear. Apart from the money saved the exercise and fresh air will leave you feeling invigorated. In the long run you will live a longer and healthier life and save on medical bills.

The bike is I believe humanities greatest invention and as we pass peak oil its importance will only grow. And just to finish here’s Ivan Illich again on the bike.

Cycling on the Great Western Greenway

Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometer of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man's metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.


Bicycles are not only thermodynamically efficient, they are also cheap. With his much lower salary, the Chinese acquires his durable bicycle in a fraction of the working hours an American devotes to the purchase of his obsolescent car.