Face smashed

Incredibly, no cars were involved in the making of these wounds. I braked hard to avoid hitting a jaywalking student who was talking on her cell phone, flew over the handlebars, and face-planted on the pavement. My tooth went through my upper lip and then broke off. I have stitches inside and outside, and miraculously, no head trauma or broken bones.

This probably looks like a good argument not to ride a bicycle in a city. But let me say this: the likelihood of this happening is actually far smaller than the likelihood that you will be in a car accident. My injuries are nothing compared to the physical and psychological trauma experienced by my mother and sister earlier this year in a motor vehicle accident which was due to the very same cause -- someone else's carelessness while talking on a cell phone.

Beyond that, think about this: you can compare the energy efficiency of a bicycle with that of a car, by using calories (kcal) as a metric. A healthy human burns 0.049 kcal/minute at 15mph, or 0.139 kcal/minute at 25mph. 15mph is a nice approximation of cycle-commuting, so I use that here. So I, with a weight of 145 pounds, burn 7.105 kcal/minute @ 15 mph as I ride to work or go riding on my lunch break. This equates to 28.42 kcal burned every mile ridden, if I maintain about 15 mph.

A gallon of gas contains 31,000 kcal of energy. If I consumed gasoline like a car, I would get ~1,090 miles per gallon of gasoline! A human being on a bicycle is the most efficient machine in the universe, in terms of distance traveled per unit energy. In my humble opinion, the answer to the fossil fuel crisis is not fuel cells or biodiesel, it's carbohydrates. And if more savvy people rode bicycles instead of driving cars, injuries like the above would become far less common than they already are.

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Addendum, 12/13/07, as I said elsewhere:

Cars do several things for us.
1. Kill people and animals and plants by polluting the air
2. Kill people by making oil into a political tool that starts wars
3. Kill people by making them sedentary, obese, and lazy
4. Kill people (this is called an "accident")

"Guns don't kill people, son, people kill people!"