On Riding West and Oil Economics

Saturday a bunch of us from the BCC went out for a properly long ride. It was supposed to be out to the Forks of the Credit, except that due to construction the road was closed and the very best part, the reason we hauled all the way through the city to Belfountain had to be missed. Still we rode over 198km with an average near as makes no difference of 29km/h, which is especially impressive because on the ride out there was no wind but by the time we turned around there was a brutal head wind.

On Mississauga Road, up around Boston Mills Road a bunch of guys in an oncoming Jeep threw a full water bottle at us, and nailed someone in the pack square in the head. I wish we got their licence plate, we would have phoned that one in, but they drove much too quickly (I don't think they were worried about a speeding ticket if they were throwing 1kg projectiles at people.) It was a really disgusting and repulsive thing to do and frankly kind of ruined the ride for me there.
I mean the guys I rode with were great and the scenery was nice, but when drivers have that sort of attitude towards cyclists. It was not like we were blocking the Jeep (he was oncoming, remember?) and it is a quiet country road with lots of room and we were in a single file paceline too, almost in the gravel on the right hand side! No this sort of attitude from some drivers, it is where the expression "war on the car" comes from. Of course we all know there is no war on the car, that is silly political grandstanding, what there is, is an expectation among all too many motorists that they ought to have an untrammeled right to the road, that anyone who dares to take precious tarmac from their beloved automobiles is fair game for their grill or their water bottles. I guess I can only hope that the monsters who were out for a joy ride got busted by the police for reckless driving at some later point that day and end up loosing their licence and are forced to ride a bike for the rest of their days, that to me would be an appropriate punishment, somehow I doubt that is what is going to happen.

On my drive to work I often listen to the radio but lately I have found CBC to be rather unengaged. I have taken a new habit, doing number crunching. Today I started with the fact that the Peel P-50, the smallest production car in the world had fuel economy of 1 gallon (presumably UK, or imperial gallon) per hundred miles, now one imperial gallon is 4.546 Litres and one hundred miles is 160.9344km, so the P-50 can go a mind blowing 35.4km on a Litre of petrol, put in modern metric terms, a P-50 gets 2.82L/100km, which is about twice the range per Litre of my diesel Jetta. But what gets me, is while the fuel economy is pretty impressive, consider this, that P-50, uses about a million calories of energy to cover 10km, by contrast for one thousand calories, using my bicycle I can cover 25km, and I look a lot less idiotic on my ride than Jermey Clarkson in his.