Bicycling is faster than driving . . .

Brad Morgan writes:

Most people who pass me in their cars probably think I am terribly impractical to commute on a bicycle. As they fume by, I smugly recall a calculation by Ivan Illich, the Austrian-born philospher and social critic, that the private automobile actually travels about 2.5 miles per hour (where he was living at the time, in Mexico) - if the time spent paying for and maintaining the beast is included.

Brad does the same calculation for bicycle vs. automobile in modern America--finding that the car averages 13.33 mph over its lifetime (counting in the hours spent earning money to pay for the car, insurance, repairs, etc., as well as driving time) while a similar calculation for the bicycle give 13.56 MPH.

So there you are! Faster by an amazing 0.23 MPH.

However, there is an even more important conclusion:

Furthermore, of the total time Brad has invested in his bike, ninety percent is spent doing what he usually enjoys - bicycling! Whereas Max spends two-thirds of his time working for the privilege of driving his new car the remaining one-third.