It seems, though, I was not as far off the mark as you thought. One enterprising entrepreneur has built a business replacing internal combustion engines with humans. Known as Pedapods, space-age rickshaws now ply the streets of Sydney competing with yellow cabs and stretch limos.
The highly visual, arguably attractive taxi-alternative is powered by, you guessed it, a human. A small electric motor can be used to help drag larger tourists up hill, which is just as well as the Pedapod seats three and some of Sydney’s streets slope slightly.
I expect that local operators will see the benefits of paying backpackers next to nothing to drag wealthier tourists up Danger Point for a view of the Great Divide,while earning advertising dollars by promoting local businesses on the attention-grabbing cab. I’m surprised that a gymnasium chain has not joined in charging gym membership fees to Pedapod “pilots†who will then pay for the privilege of publicly pulling people in a partly powered pushbike.
It’s true, novelty plays a certain part in this business model, ensuring the advertising revenue contributes to the set up costs. The point though, is exactly the one I made last week: As oil costs continue to soar (temporary corrections do not buck the overall trend) muscle power will once again play an appreciable role in our daily life.
Since we cannot do everything for ourselves, we should start considering the option of paying another to do it for us.
Simple arithmetic dictates that there must be more employees as there are employed, so some of us will have to be paid to do someone else’s chores. I kinda thought that was already the definition of employment, but some of you, I know, will argue that work ennobles and defines us.
The broad consensus is that our suburban life-style is roughly equal to those in classical times who had a household retinue of forty slaves.
In truth, the human is not a terribly efficient machine.
We consume about 2.5 kilowatt hours worth of energy as food every day, even when we are not working. When physically working at full stretch, such as pedalling three large German tourists from Pacific Fair to Jupiters, we burn about 400 watts – using our daily food supply in six hours – to deliver about 30 watts. The other 370 is exhaled as carbon dioxide, heat and flatulence.
By comparison, a litre of unleaded petrol delivers about 10kilowatt hours or four person day’s worth of food. Using these numbers, some people claim that it is more efficient to drive to the shops than it is to walk.
The point is, you burn the fuel you eat anyway, watching the telly or digging a ditch. By doing useful physical work, you contribute twice. Firstly through the work you do, secondly by replacing the machine that burns fossil fuels to do it for you.
Giovanni Ebono is on-air at 99.9 FM this morning from 9:00am