Judging by the numbers from the Berliner Senat (or from speedometers), cars are a lot faster than bikes. However, a re-evaluation of the way in which we think about speed would have cyclists (and in some cases pedestrians) whizzing by motorists almost all the time: enter the concept of effective speed.
How fast do we go when we move around our cities? For Berlin, estimates of the average speed are about 25 km/h for motorists. But that’s just the average speed from the time a journey begins to when it ends, depositing you at your destination. But when does a journey really begin? Did you have to brush snow off your windshield or pump up your tires? If you walk, did you include the time it took to tie your shoes? Is the last hour you spent at work dedicated to earning the cash to enable your drive home? Or the first fifteen minutes of your income allotted to paying your bike mechanic for the tune-up you got last week?
Traditionally, we measure speed in terms of distance traveled divided by the time it took to travel that distance. That’s how we arrive at ideas like ‘kilometers per hour.’ The most recent data released by the Berliner Senat claims that motorists in Berlin travel at an average of 24.9 km/h. Cyclists, it reports, have an average speed of 12.3 km/h. This difference might seem large, but what if we figure in the time that motorists and cyclists invest in paying for and maintaining their vehicles?
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