NYTimes: Just a Bike Race, You Say? Think Again
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/22/weekinreview/22basic.html?_r=1&adxnnl=1&oref=slogin&adxnnlx=1191671535-gD51WcvTf0my58o4c8ajjw
“David Gordon Wilson, an emeritus professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and author of “Bicycling Science” (MIT Press, 2004), calculated that Tour riders generate 400 watts of power when they are riding up mountains or trying to break away from the pack. An average person riding a bicycle and working as hard as possible puts out 150 to 200 watts, he said.”

Scientific American July 2007 page 34:
Data Points
Tour de Energy
Each day Tour de France cyclists expend
incredible amounts of energy, especially
during the mountain stages. We asked
mechanical engineer David Gordon
Wilson of the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology and author of Bicycling
Science to calculate energy output and
other intriguing statistics associated
with this year’s grueling stage 14, which
takes place on July 22. On the following
day, during stage 15, the riders will do as
much work again. —Mark Fischetti

Elevation: 338 meters
Mount Everest
Elevation: 8,848 m

Tour de France STAGE 14
Start: Mazamet
Elevation: 338 meters

Segment distance: 100 kilometers
(46.5 km after start to 146.5 km)

Pedal rotations: 17,000

ENERGY EXPENDED
In joules: 4 million
In stairs climbed: 34,400
In Empire State Buildings walked up: 18.5

FOOD ENERGY NEEDED
In calories: 4,000
In 16-oz. bottles of Mountain Dew: 18

Stage distance: 197 kilometers

ENERGY EXPENDED
In ascents up Mount Everest*: 1

HEAT CONTINUOUSLY DISSIPATED
By Tour de France rider: 1.2 kilowatts
By four-slice toaster: 1.1 kilowatts

Finish: Plateau-de-Beille
Elevation: 1,780 m

Not irrational, just cynical.

He said he agreed with the caller and described the Paris bicycle system using 10,000 public bikes and that he thought that there should be no limits on pedicabs in New York City.

An archived version of the radio broadcast has been posted at:

“Live from City Hall with Mayor Mike and John Gambling”
Friday, October 5, 2007 (30 minutes and 10 seconds into the show)
http://www.nyc.gov/portal/site/nycgov/?front_door=true

An MP3 copy of the radio broadcast can also be downloaded from this location.

Nevertheless, she is so destructively wrong on this issue, and I hope to see a huge intelligent movement opposing her candidacy, should she run for mayor.

Human-powered vehicles should be a major portion of transportation agendas including the one at CUNY (Bronx) today.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/09/02/conference-the-road-to-energy-independence-new-york-citys-alternative-transportation-future/#comment-38007

With climate change, any vehicle that moves more than a half ton of steel and glass to move a single person is not sustainable. The vehicles are unsustainable and the infrastructures required to support these vehicles are unsustainable and if things continue the way they are going they will likely end up as spare parts in a future of real “Road Warrior” scenarios.

Besides being completely unsustainable and extremely wasteful, current transportation and systems do not work, or work well with automobiles as the poster child killing 1,250,000 annually — the greatest cause of death to people under thirty — and a major contributor to the rapid destruction of an environment capable of supporting life on earth as we know it.

Immediately prior to 911 there were people “with their hair on fire” warning about the potential for disaster and the current administration did nothing.

With climate change the situation is infinitely worse with many times more people in-the-know with their “hair on fire”.

Yet, this conference is business as usual and does not speak to the extreme urgency of climate change.

None of the vehicles at this conference’s website come even close: http://www.bcc.cuny.edu/institutionalDevelopment/cse/VehicleExposition.cfm

Even worse, this conference by all appearances will be quite boring.

No mention is made of human-scale and hybrid human-electric transport and transit which can provide the type of positive disruptive change to developed world transportation and systems and being fully scalable to use in the developing world will greatly mitigate its disastrous roll in the accelerating climate change crisis.

One-half billion people used human-scale transport in China to bring it into the twentieth century. Copying the disaster of developed-world transportation threatens to set it back further than from where it started and along with the rest of the world.

http://www.streetsblog.org/2007/09/02/conference-the-road-to-energy-independence-new-york-citys-alternative-transportation-future/#comment-38007