Cost of Transportation

When we talk about forms of transportation, we are often interested in fuel economy because that is what we are used to, but what really matters is the amount of energy it takes to move a certain amount of weight a certain distance. We have tried to represent this in the WAVE scale in our automotive section, but here is an old graphic that I found that explain this idea a little better. You can tell how old it is by the fact that it was scanned from a journal article in order to digitize it. You can see the obvious diagonal where most of the methods fall. Lighter and smaller animals use more energy to move one gram a kilometer as would be expected, but it is the outliers in this plot that are the most interesting. If we look at a helicopter for example, its cost of transport is similar to that of a hummingbird and obviously wastes a large amount of energy. Salmon and humans on a bicycle on the other hand, are far more efficient than other forms of transportation . The salmon is a particularly interesting case, because it actually uses the flow of current downstream to help it swim upstream, similar to the way that a sailboat can sail into the wind.