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It’s the Thunderdome of transportation: Comedian Mark Malkoff on a child’s tricycle, going up against the famously slow M42 bus. Two modes of transport enter, one mode of transport leaves … well, okay, they both leave, but one gets there a minute and a half faster. And it isn’t the bus.

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Malkoff framed his experiment as crummy mass transit vs. child’s toy, but it’s really human power vs. traffic. The bus isn’t the bad guy here — sure, it may take more than 14 minutes to travel a mile, but it’s also getting a lot of people a mile closer to their destinations. It’s all those cars — the ones moving none too fast in the background, helping to slow the bus down — that really get the worst of this battle. (And it’s the people on the grown-up bikes who come out ahead, needless to say.)

Now, the real question is how the bus stacks up against Malkoff’s previous stunt — getting people to carry him the length of Manhattan.

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