@dr2chase @TimWardCam @Natasha_Jay I didn't miss the exercise, but it is not part of the metric in the infographic. That is a fault of the metric, not of my calculation. If you ask a different question - for example, it would be equally arbitrary to include listening to a podcast in the car to count the fuel toward entertainment - then you get a different answer.

@dr2chase @TimWardCam @Natasha_Jay Maybe I should have made explicit the intended subtext that this is a /really bad/ way of comparing transit - utility per unit fossil fuel is far better, but even then I don't expect anyone to change based on an infographic. But it shouldn't be marginal calories, as the person driving will be consuming basal calories at least, and probably a bit more as driving requires effort. But yes, you might get as high as 10% efficiency, still worst by that metric.

@dr2chase @TimWardCam @Natasha_Jay So with your blog's figures varying between 20:1 for meat and 1:1.3 for potatoes, so 10:1 for a mixed diet seems about right, then the 10% efficiency figure I remembered seems low compared to 24% quoted in wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_power#cite_note-2) , but their figure is just for one muscle rather than a whole human. So increase it to 2.4% if you want. The reasons for choosing cycling are not its efficiency, but many other benefits.

@TimWardCam @Natasha_Jay What figure you get rather depends what question you ask - moving a cyclist requires much less power so it still ends up ahead of a car despite being less efficient, and it's not like people don't eat when they don't cycle, so if you just count the extra energy required you'd get a different figure.

@TimWardCam @Natasha_Jay A person on a bicycle is way worse than an ICE car, due to it taking about ten calories of fossil fuel to farm and transport one calorie of food on average in the West, and human bodies are worse than ICE engines at converting fuel to motive power, between 5 and 10 percent, (we are warm blooded and evolved to generate heat). So we end up about 1% efficient converting fossil fuel to movement, better for vegans or subsistance farmers.

@tankgrrl Still so far behind HAL 9000