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+---
+title: "Cars vs Bikes: The space efficiency"
+date: 2021-11-16
+lang: en
+categories: [ blog, miscellaneous, calculation ]
+tags: [ vehicle, car, bike, space ]
+translationKey: "car-vs-bikes-space"
+---
+
+A few days ago, I said somewhere on the internet saying cars are the cause for
+traffic jam and motorbikes are much faster in a city.  Today I'm gonna to do
+one of the most useless things: doing the actual calculation to verify this
+obvious intuition.  Carry on if you're bored enough like I am right now.  It's
+a lot of guesstimate, though, since cars as well as bikes come in all shapes
+and sizes. 
+
+I take some numbers from [automobile dimension][cars] and [Power Sports
+Guide][bikes]: a car is around 4.4 meters long and 2 meters wide; a motorbike
+is around 2 meter long and 0.75 meter wide (less than 200 cc, the common type
+driven in the city).
+An average car is therefore 8.8 square meters large and a motorbike 1.5.
+
+A car can take around 5 to 8 people, while a motorbike can only takes 2 people
+(by law---I'm sure some people can carry twice that number).  So, the maximum
+capacity for a car is roughly 0.6 to 0.9 persons/m², and that for a motorbike
+is 1.3 persons/m².
+
+Hmm... that doesn't seem like much difference, but a motorbike is twice as
+space-efficient as a car.  Imagine you suddenly have twice as much space for
+driving.
+
+Well, that's the ideal scenario, which is not usually the case, though.  Most
+the time, the one doesn't fill up all the available room on a car.  In daily
+travel, a car carries up to 4 people: parents go to work, children to school,
+and I'm fairly certain that their workplaces and the schools are often far
+enough they drive a significant distance with much less passengers.
+Oftentimes, I only see 1 person/car, but let's be generous and say there are 2
+people on average.  That'd be 3 times less space-efficient than an average
+motorbike with only 1 person (0.24 vs 0.67 persons/m²).
+
+Conclusion: Motorbikes are better for the city. Cars can awesome for occasion
+when you want to go to a different city or when the weather hates you.  But in
+terms of daily travel, motorbikes rock!
+
+Addendum: a city bus is much more efficient than both of them: having a
+capacity of around 100 people on a 30m² of area, which is 3.3 persons/m², it is
+5 times better than a motorbike.  In contrast with cars and motorbikes, buses
+are often full during rush hours when traffic jam most likely happens.  While
+buses suck more when it's stuck in a traffic jam due to its size (just like
+cars), at least you can enjoy a good book on it.  Public transport rocks![^0]
+
+-----
+
+P.S. Sorry for the boring update after a long while not writing.  Kinda caught
+up with life including frustratingly moving around in the city.
+I'm writing a web client for lotide, named [Luna][luna], using [the least
+fitting web framework ever][django], by the way, and I'm adding matrix
+implementations to my long lists of cool things I could try to work on if I
+don't need money to live.  Next post will be about Luna, the lotide client and
+how I'm using the least fitting library for it.
+
+[cars]: https://www.automobiledimension.com/
+[bikes]: https://powersportsguide.com/average-motorcycle-dimensions/
+[bus]: https://www.dimensions.com/collection/buses
+
+[luna]: https://sr.ht/~huyngo/luna
+[django]: https://www.djangoproject.com/
+
+[^0]: Except when you wait for it for hours at the stop due to, well, traffic
+  jam, or when you hurt your hands when the bus brakes, because heavy things
+  have big momentum.