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@straphanger@urbanists.social"There's no machine known that is more efficient than a human on a bicycle. Bowl of oatmeal, thirty miles. You can't come close to that."
—Not surprising that Bill Nye, the Science Guy, has known about the efficiency of the bicycle for a long time.
"The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created. Converting calories into gas, a bicycle gets the equivalent of three thousand miles per gallon."
— Bill Strickland
(Chart: Scientific American)
A more up-to-date chart, created by Alexandre Bizeul, with data from the International Energy Agency:
"The bicycle is the most efficient machine ever created...a triangle-framed bike can easily carry 10x its own weight—capacity no automobile, airplane or bridge can match.”
—also Bill Strickland
Are you adding in the inherent energy content of a smooth road?
My Dad built those for a career, and I saw a lot of energy expended by the earthmovers, the backhoes, the rolling compactors, and of course the asphaltic concrete - the gravel had to be crushed and transported, the bitumen had to be extracted and heated, and pressed down.
Granted, you get a lot of bicycle miles from a road, but it should still be added in.
For the fact-checkers doing the math:
Sure, Bill's example probably needs 2 bowls of oatmeal not 1, but your average car needs at least 28,000 calories to go 30 miles, so that's like 50 or 60 bowls of oatmeal