Riding is faster than driving
May 10th, 2007A car is faster than a bike. At least, that’s what we all believe. But in fact, it is false. We already know that in congested downtown traffic a car is hardly faster than a bike, but I am saying that riding is faster than driving — always . The proof is from Ivan Illich and was first proposed in the seventies, but I think it is more valid now than ever before.
The average driving speed is 50 km/h (counting commuting + vacation). The average yearly mileage is 12000 km. Therefore, a driver spends 240 hours driving each year.
Let us now introduce the concept of generalized average speed: said driver spends 200 hours driving, but how many hours are spent working to pay for the car? The average yearly cost for a car (amortizing, insurance, gas, repairs) is 5000 €. The average hourly salary is 13 €. Therefore, the average driver spends more than 380 hours each year to earn money to pay for the car.
Consequently, the total time spent for transportation will be 620 hours for a total distance of 12000 km. This amounts to a generalized average speed of 19 km/h (12 mph).
This is below the average speed I am doing with my bicycle.
Depending on whether you’d better spend the time at work or on your bike, you can choose either solution, as both choices are absolutely equivalent in terms of how fast you get around.
Side-note 0
The figure are for France. They can probably be generalized to western Europe with reasonable confidence. Other figures need to be used for elsewhere, but the results are generally similar.
Side-note 1
If you own a car and no dot use it much because you prefer not to pollute, remember that you are still working close to 400 hours a year to pay for the car. If you drive less than 3000 km a year (which would be the case if you use public transportation to commute, but you still keep a vehicle for week-ends and vacations), the same computation leads to an average speed of 7 km/h: you could probably walk there faster 
Side-note 2
You might say that one single driver can carry up to four passengers, when the rider can’t. Just know that there are on average 1.2 passengers per car. I do not want to run the figures again, so I concede 20% more average speed: that’s 24 km/h (what I am doing with my bike).
Side-note 3
The average transportation speed (counting the time spent working to pay for one’s transportation means) has therefore hardly improved since the late nineteenth century.
Side-note 4
This does not count the invisible costs, for instance the cost of global warming. If we did, we would probably reach negative values for the average speed, as a lifetime of work could probably not pay for the damages to nature.
And don’t forget, if you drive a car to and from work every day, rather than riding a bike, you have to add time to your schedule for working out, if you want to keep in shape. A while back I heard on the radio about a little experiment done in NYC: four people left from the same place with the same destination: one drove; one took the subway; one took a bus; and one walked. The walker got there first. I imagine the biker might have beat the walker (depending on the biker’s traffic-rule-following tendencies).
My traffic-rule-following tendency is somewhere over 105% as a driver, and probably subzero on a bicycle (maybe that’s why I love riding so much).
And you are right, if we take the gym time (and associated cost, therefore extra working time) off the bicycle data, it might reach an average speed of 30 km/h. And for people who do not exercise at all, we’d have to take into account diet costs, health problems, and whole years of lost life into the data — I’d rather not try to figure this out.
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