A friend sent a YouTube video of Jeremy Clarkson — who got booted from the BBC TV show Top Gear for being a major asshole — arguing that bicycles are bad for the environment. I wasted nearly six minutes watching this rubbish and another fifteen minutes researching a response to my friend. Friends don’t let friends do Jeremy Clarkson.

I link to the video only because without it you won’t know what I’m ranting about. In it, Clarkson peddles one bogus notion after another. He points to trees that would be cut down to make way for bike lanes — because tree lives matter more than human ones, I guess. Bike lanes, he argues, block ambulances (apparently car congestion never does). He falsely claims that the mayor of London wants to ban “all private cars,” though in fact the proposed ban would cover only cars burning fossil fuels, not electric cars.

He makes cheap jokes at the expense of cyclists, pointing to one: “How much has he contributed to the economy today? Nothing.” Transit riders also get their fair share of abuse: “You can’t go on one of those,” he says, pointing to one of London’s iconic doubledecker buses, “because you get a disease.” Even while arguing that cycling is bad for the environment, he still treats climate change as a joke, which is just obscene this late in the game. If you need a point-by-point rebuttal, Simon MacMichael offers an excellent one over at road.cc.

“Let’s have an intelligent debate,” he concludes. All right, let’s.

Jeremy Clarkson is to transportation policy what Donald Trump and Boris Johnson are to politics: a vicious self-aggrandizing troll who appeals to the worst in people and finds his own utterances terribly clever. His anti-bike jihad on YouTube is 10 percent information and 90 percent unsupported assertion, with just enough factual seasoning to support the sneering lies.

Before I go any further, let me point out that I’m not a cyclist, so I don’t have a dog in this hunt. But I do live in Manhattan, where a super-majority of people live in car-free households — yet still experience the daily fear of being killed or maimed by the privileged few who choose to drive. My sympathy goes to the cyclists, who annoy pedestrians like me but rarely kill us, versus the drivers, who killed 200 New Yorkers in 2018 and maimed thousands more.

A perfect illustration of Clarkson’s mendacity comes as he carries on about the cost of a London bike lane while saying nothing about the vastly greater sums of money spent to provide mostly free streets and highways for drivers. Cycling and transit projects always come with scary and explicit price tags while roads, apparently, are funded by the Road Fairy. You just wish for them, and there they are!

But let’s get to his central contention that showboating around the landscape in a multi-ton death machine is environmentally superior to using human-powered transportation. This is a ludicrous proposition. The average weight of a midsized car is 3500 pounds. The average weight of a bike is 17 pounds. The bike’s weight is 0.5 percent of the car’s weight. One car weighs about the same as 200 bikes.

Which requires more energy, directly or indirectly, to move a person — the 3500-pound vehicle or the 17-pound vehicle? Which takes more energy and materials to manufacture? Which generates more greenhouse gases in manufacturing? Which generates more greenhouse gases on the road?

I freely invite Jeremy Clarkson to present factual evidence that the vehicle that weighs 1/200th as much as the other vehicle is the one that, pound for pound, is environmentally indefensible. Otherwise, to use his own words, he can just fuck off.

It must be a burden for Clarkson to live in the U.K., which has some of the world’s best transit systems and most walkable towns and cities. It is also a burden for British cyclists to live with him — since he is, by his own account, a dangerous driver. But hey, as long as he’s trapped in his car dependency, Londoners riding the Tube won’t have to listen to his gaseous tirades.