I thought the same until I started following this up. The figures are out there to work out for yourself.
dieoff.org/page40.htm[/quote]
If there are figures on there sufficiently detailed to allow me to make that calculation, I didn’t spot them.
The relevant figure I did see, however, allows some crude guesstimates.
They say it takes 400 gallons of oil to feed an American for a year.(As so often, Americans are very much a worst case here)
That’s 1.095890411 gallons/day, but they’ll presumably only be those little toy US gallons, so not quite as bad as it at first seems.
According to this sitehttp://www.cptips.com/calex.htm#enoth, Cycling at 20mph uses 37Cal/mile, Thats 17760
Cal for 480 miles if you cycled for 24hrs
According to the UN FAO, the average American consumes 3770 calories (That should be kcal or Cal, tut tut) a day.
http://www.fao.org/statistics/yearbook/vol_1_2/pdf/United-States-of-America.pdf
So cycling for 24 hrs at 20mph increases your calorie consumption by 4.71
fold (much more than I would have guessed, though its an over-estimate because the FAO figure will include some Americans who take exercise, and even some American cyclists, though not many doing 480 miles a day) equivalent to 5.16 US gallons, on which you travel 480 miles, or
92.98 miles / US gallon
But thats per person, so against two people in a car its equivalent to about 47 miles/US gallon. Still better than most cars, but not by much. Damn!
(Edit: Or I’m wrong, of course.)
The cycling edge will presumably be greater for people on non-American high carb/low meat diets.
This calculation also ignores the difference in energy value between “oil” and refined vehicle fuel, which will tend to favor the car in the comparison.
I can’t think about the Routemaster today, I might think about that tomorrow.
Edit: Not much thought apparently required really.
Routemaster RML has/had 72 seats, and officially 5 standing (almost sure I remember more in practice) and is variously reported to do 10-13 mpg, probably depending on the engine fit. Those’ll be British, Imperial gallons, so the lower figure = 8.326 US mpg, which works out at 641.10 person-mpg
Volkswagen Jetta (I dunno any American-made diesel cars. There’ll be an “economy” option on some huge pickups for cowboys of a pinko brokeback-mountain persuasion, doubtless, but thats not a very fair comparison) is quoted at 30mpg city (probably fair comparison with the bus), or 150person-mpg if its carrying 5 people.
IOW less than a fourth of the efficiency of the bus. Seems a no-brainer, unless I’ve screwed up.
Sorry Mr S. Its STILL a bit hard to believe.