Watch a tricycle spank a bus in a low-speed race

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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.

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.