Is Walking Really Better Than Driving?

[Question]

Is Walking Really Better Than Driving?

[anonymous]

1 min readJan 7, 2024

-4

Since the human body is basically a robot fuelled by food, and the production of food produces greenhouse gasses (as well as other negative things (namely farmed animals)), I wonder:

what is the E^[1](^[2] per meter walked) of walking?

Or maybe some other measurement of the cost of walking? (For example, E(USD spent per meter walked).)

How does this change when, say, on a bicycle? or a scooter? or on a train? etc.

(If you did not do research on this, and do not plan on doing research on this, don't do research on this. I do not need to know this information. I just figured it would be nice to know.)

^{^}
E(X) is the expected value of some random value X, or "if you were to randomly generate different values of X, and take the arithmetic mean of them all, as the number of X's you generate gets larger, the arithmetic mean of them all approaches E(x)."
^{^}
$M t C O_{2} e$ means "the amount of [metric tons of [carbon dioxide]] that would be needed to produce the same impact on the environment.", or "the environmental impact, in terms of [metric tons of carbon dioxide]". (Not to be confused with "the environmental impact of ONLY the $C O_{2} .$ ")

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dominicroser

Economics professor Reiner Eichenberger has looked into this: https://road.cc/content/news/cycling-live-blog-15-november-2022-297375#live-blog-item-39683

However, I would not recommend to trust his views. While he is insightful and interesting, he is also one of the most contrarian, provocation-loving people I know. Plus, these thoughts are published in a column for a small newspaper rather than an academic journal.

If you ever find someone who has seriously looked into that question, I'd be interested to know.

The basic question makes sense, though: walking and cycling use energy, too - just like cars do. And if the energy used for walking comes from eating climate-harming food, there is a question to be asked about the climate-friendliness of walking.

[anonymous]

Thanks! I got the Idea from the question after vaguely hearing Adam Conover say something about it at the end of a snippet of one of the "Adam ruins everything" episodes, saying something along the lines of:

"Actually, walking can be EVEN WORSE than driving".

I'll try to find the exact episode and link it.

[anonymous]

Found it!

dominicroser

Thanks!

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^{^}

E(X) is the expected value of some random value X, or "if you were to randomly generate different values of X, and take the arithmetic mean of them all, as the number of X's you generate gets larger, the arithmetic mean of them all approaches E(x)."

^{^}

$M t C O_{2} e$ means "the amount of [metric tons of [carbon dioxide]] that would be needed to produce the same impact on the environment.", or "the environmental impact, in terms of [metric tons of carbon dioxide]". (Not to be confused with "the environmental impact of ONLY the $C O_{2} .$ ")