Riding in a peloton is the most energy efficient locomotion – research (2018)

I got the chance to ride in a pretty large and fast formation during an otherwise casual charity ride a few years back. Really enjoyable and a bit nerve wracking at the same time being in close quarters like that. When in the middle of the pack, it was pretty amazing how little energy it took to maintain speed--just a few half-hearted pedal strokes every few seconds. Any more and you&#x27;d start creeping up on the rear tire of the person in front of you.<p>edit: Forgot the best part. The formation ended when someone near the front swerved to avoid a hole in the trail. Person behind them--taken by surprise--abruptly braked. Chaos ensued. Chaos propagated upstream and eventually got to me. I ran over a downed bike and flew over my own bike landing on my handle bars--broke a rib (though didn&#x27;t know it until a few days later). Why would the organizers of a casual charity ride allow formation riding, you ask? They don&#x27;t.

Meanwhile if you have a Peloton™ bike at home, you’re probably looking at the _least_ energy efficient locomotion.

&gt; It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal<p>This seems highly questionable. I would hazard a guess for example that cargo ships are significantly more energy efficient per gram per kilometer.<p>Edit: indeed my intuition was right, going by Wikipedia. Domestic waterborn and rail can transport a metric ton (i.e. 1000 kg) of freight 4-6 km using 1 MJ of energy. By contrast, a velomobile can transport a person ~12 km using 1 MJ of energy, but a person weights only about 70 kg.

I would like to have seen a comparison to a state-of-the-art velomobile though. They have greatly reduced drag compared to a single cyclist too.

There’s YouTube videos of a guy who, on a downhill stretch, gets on his tummy and is like a rigid dart flying through the air, overtaking everyone at a ridiculous speed.<p>I was always curious if it was real and why not everyone does it.

You can always gain efficiency by giving up safety.<p>Just look up peloton crashes. Or imagine cars driving like that.

the air resistance savings in a paceline are absolutely insane to experience. Even with just one riding partner, we can go significantly farther on a ride.

I cycled the UK coast to coast with friends. We did a peleton on a boring straight cycle track that went on for many miles. We managed to do 20mph for a couple of hours with each of us taking a turn at the front for 5 minutes a time.<p>I&#x27;ve also done track cycling where you leave a 30cm gap between wheels and have no brakes. That is truly unnerving.

<i>“Man on a bicycle can go three or four times faster than the pedestrian, but uses five times less energy in the process. He carries one gram of his weight over a kilometre of flat road at an expense of only 0.15 calories. The bicycle is the perfect transducer to match man’s metabolic energy to the impedance of locomotion. Equipped with this tool, man outstrips the efficiency of not only all machines but all other animals as well.</i><p>What about uphill or uneven terrain. going downhill on bike is very efficient too. You can test this by rolling a ball down even a slight grade. Yes, in artificial conditions bikes are better.

The study is good, with the possible exception of using stationary (terra-cotta) riders in the wind tunnel. It seems possible that moving riders would create turbulence that would change the equation.

I call bullshit on the title. Those guys didn&#x27;t even check recumbent bikes. And they didn&#x27;t check having a cover around riders, either.<p>If you want to go for full efficiency, safety or practicality be damned, a recumbent that makes you lie basically flat just above the ground and covered all over should be really efficient. For maximum insanity, lie prone.<p>Or, since they allowed multiple riders, you could build a contraption that allows multiple people to ride in a recumbent position inside a single cover.<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engineering.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;human-powered-vehicle-breaks-world-record" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.engineering.com&#x2F;story&#x2F;human-powered-vehicle-brea...</a><p>&gt; Analysis of the vehicle performance showed that Eta requires less than 198 watts of pedal power at 90 km&#x2F;h, which translates to a 9,544 MPGe highway fuel efficiency. According to Aerovelo, this is the highest per-passenger MPGe of any existing transportation technology at this speed.<p>And they didn&#x27;t even ride that thing in a pack.

Non-native speaker here.<p>Didn&#x27;t know what a &quot;Peloton&quot; is, but assumed it&#x27;s what we call &quot;Pedalo&quot; [1].<p>Gave me quite a laugh when opening OPs link. ;-)<p>[1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=pedalo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;results?search_query=pedalo</a>

A cycling peloton is just humans imitating birds. If Peloton, the company, did not want to lose lawsuits it should have used a word that wasn&#x27;t already in use in the same neighborhood.<p>They could have called the company Wopat or something, and people still would have bought the things (given Covid, but still).

I think I&#x27;ve known this for years. When I was a kid I had a book entitled &quot;How things work&quot;. In it was a large picture, spread across 2 pages, showing birds, land animals, people in cars, trains, aeroplanes etc, all moving from left to right as if in a race. Above each participant was a figure indicating something like Joules per gram. The &quot;participants&quot; in the &quot;race&quot; were ranked according to this figure, with the front-runners having the lowest associated values.<p>Waay out in front was a man on a bicycle. Add in the help of cumulative drag and sharing the load against the wind resistance, it makes sense.

&quot;It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal...&quot;<p>I love bicycles!

Tailgaiting is hypermiling.<p>We&#x27;re close to having the tech necessary to make the tailgating safe. A critical mass of cooperating auto pilot software should do it.

I&#x27;m glad they specified &quot;planet&quot; because bicycle riding on the Moon is probably the most energy efficient human locomotion

<i>It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal, but this new research suggests that a cyclist shielded from the wind is even more energy efficient than, say, a hang-glider.</i><p>What are they counting as the input energy for a hang-glider?

And I thought that paragliding or traveling by boat downriver are more efficient. I guess I was wrong.

They weren’t on my group ride tonight

It seems like having more people makes everything more efficient. For example, with hiking if you have 100 + people single file on a trail , the guy in front can stop, take a break, and rejoin at the end without everyone having to stop. repeat.

I once drafted behind a 2 ton truck that was doing about 45 km&#x2F;h, over the space of about a mile. It felt like cycling down a gentle hill: just a minimal effort to maintain speed.

If bicycles are so efficient, one wonders why motorcycles are not.<p>As for evolution, bicycles require smooth roads, which are not naturally encountered at all.

Anyone else misread this as “on a Peloton”?

Is&#x27;nt this bad for peloton sales?. Don&#x27;t you need to be not so efficient to burn calories.

I think a spore floating thousands of miles simply because of its geometry is the most efficient.

100% efficiency if the back rider just hitches a rope to his peloton.

Also taking into account the embodied energy of the bike?

Sailing?

(2018)

For anyone as confused as I was, peloton is the term for riding bicycles close together in a group. Not the brand of indoor exercise machines.

Why would you need a supercomputer to figure this out instead of putting simple sensors on the bikes in a peloton?

I thought you stay in once place on a Peloton bike??

&quot;It’s long been known that an average person on a bicycle is a more efficient translator of energy per gram per kilometre than any other machine or animal&quot;<p>Yah, that&#x27;s not actually true. A human is around 25% efficient (counting only the actual energy in the food), while electric cars are around 60%.<p>And if you count the energy needed to grow the food, even gas cars are more efficient than humans. And that&#x27;s even if you only count the payload and not the weight of the vehicle.<p>And flying birds easily are more efficient than humans on a bike because they can use wind to help them.