The inefficiency of the automobile

I must rant about the inefficiency of the automobile. I has struck me a number of times in a couple kinds of situations.

Recently on my way to work on my bicycle, I noticed a large truck right behind me. This was on a city street with two lanes in each direction and a speed limit of 35 miles per hour. He stayed behind me for the longest time before finally passing. As he passed I could see why he had stayed there. There had been one car in the left land of the two lanes in our direction, in his blind spot. He was unable to move to the left to get around me because of the car on his left.

In front of us there was no other traffic. After they both had passed me, I could see that there was no other traffic behind them. The two of them were stuck behind me because of their positions relative to each other, like the comedy skit of two people trying to walk through a doorway at the same time.

Now, I suppose one could argue that the two of them had been held up because I was occupying a sliver of the right lane with my slow-moving bicycle, and if I had not been there they could have moved along at the speed limit, each in his own lane, unobstructed. But I would like to suggest that because these two people were transporting themselves in large motorized devices, and were not paying attention enough to position themselves to get around me before they came up so close to me, their delay was in part of their own making. (The truck driver probably was working, so he can be forgiven for using such a big transportation device, but he could have been a passenger car, so I think the point still is valid.)

I notice a similar phenomenon at a couple points where I have to cross a busy street. These streets are two lanes in each direction with a speed limit of 35, and there are times when I can't get across because just half a dozen cars, coming at just the right times from both directions, and positioned just the right distance apart, leave me no opening to get across. This seems like a great inefficiency. These cars, because of their speed, have to keep a certain distance free around themselves in case they have to stop, and so one person actually takes up a lot of space, and a mere half a dozen can take up so much space that I can't have ten seconds to get myself across a street.

This is just another, more subtle, aspect of the more obvious inefficiencies of the automoble (when used to transport one person a short distance) that have been explained by others. For examples, just a small amount of the energy used by one person driving himself is used to move just him. The rest of the energy is used to move the automobile itself. Destinations that we go to have to have large areas set aside for storing the automobiles that were used to transport people to those places.

Operating an automobile has been made so easy that they seem like magic carpets. You move your hand a certain way, move your foot a certain way, and you are in motion. For me, it was only after I started moving myself to work every day on a bicycle that the inefficiency of using an automobile for that purpose became much clearer. Commuting by bicycle gave me a reason to use a bicycle on a regular basis, and not using a car for that regular activity made me start to see the inefficiency of it, and start to think that there might be a better way of doing things than the way we take for granted.