Comments on: CCC – a note on cars, carbon and cycles

By: Arno Schortinghuis

Arno Schortinghuis — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 00:44:29 +0000

I have read the cycling does contribyute ghg emissions due to ghg emissions in food production, distribution and burning for food in the body. This has been calculated as equivalent to 100mpg gasoline car for meat eating cyclist and to a 200mpg gasoline car for vegitarian cyclists. I would guess that an electric bicycle produces less ghg emissions than a human powered bicycle, especially if electricity source is hydro power or other green power source like wind or solar.

By: Scrapping Cars & Recycling Blog » Blog Archive » CCC ? a note on cars, carbon and cycles - Everything and anything to do with recycling old vehicles in the 21st century.

Mon, 28 Mar 2011 10:01:25 +0000

[...] a fantastic article by Olaf Storbeck, posted three weeks ago, over on Cycling Intelligence entitled CCC ? a note on cars, carbon and cycles that I would urge all of you to read! Here’s a few extracts in the hope of whetting your [...]

By: Michael Wara

Michael Wara — Mon, 21 Mar 2011 03:22:07 +0000

Olaf,

I would suspect that from an environmental damages perspective, CO2 is not the main issue. The big harms associated with vehicular traffic, especially in cities, are NOx and particulates, both of which are ground level ozone precursors. New cars are definitely better than older cars when it comes to CO emissions but they tend to make more NOx. Further the fleet on the roads is a mix that changes quite slowly. All these pollutants have been shown to cause premature death, asthma (both childhood and adult), lung cancer, etc…

Your point that mode shift to bicycles only leads to small decreases in total emissions is of course correct. My point is that the marginal damages are higher than you are likely crediting by focusing solely on carbon.

Best,
Michael

By: Olaf Storbeck

Olaf Storbeck — Wed, 16 Mar 2011 01:15:06 +0000

David, many thanks for your comment. Indeed I did not realize that the figures from Wikipedia relate only to commuting journeys and not to all journeys. I’m going to add a correction, soon.

By: David Hembrow

David Hembrow — Tue, 15 Mar 2011 08:34:25 +0000

I think you're confusing some of your figures. The wikipedia link that you use gives "modal split of journeys to work", not of all journeys. What's more, I've yet to see any published Dutch figures which relate only to commuting journeys. That's not what they measure. As a result, I'm not sure I trust the source of this information. None of the references given are Dutch. Usually, the overall rate for all types of journey within Amsterdam is given as around 37% to 38%. It has been widely reported that there are now more bicycle trips than car trips in the city. On the other hand, many sources of information about CPH inflate its figures for the purpose of marketing the city. I wrote about this a little while back, showing the actual figures presented by the city administration itself, which are somewhat different to the marketing figures. These show that more than half of all journeys in CPH are by car and around 20% are by bicycle. In recent years, the population has become more scared to cycle, those quoting impressive figures have fallen back on only presenting the "commuting" numbers, thereby not having to concern themselves about a lower rate of more vulnerable people cycling. When I wrote my piece I extrapolated the likely overall cycling rate as around 22%, and the head of the city's bicycle programme wrote to say that he agreed with me (his reply is in the comments beneath the blog post). You need to be careful with sources for some of these things.