Today Is An Ozone Action Day, Take Transit

[iheartthed]

Well I hope this doesn't make you more skeptical but using your example of 1000 passengers on a New York subway would use MORE energy than 1000 cars. As crazy as it sounds, you need to think about how much energy it takes to move 1 train and power all the lights and equipment in the stations, ventilate tunnels, and operate signals. Obviously you have hundreds of other trains and millions of passengers to contribute their share, but it still ends up being very energy intensive. Your best case of scenario of being "break even" would be to overcrowd the trains as much as possible 24/hours day.

Buses are even WORSE. They run on fixed schedules and routes, but they either overcrowded or empty.....but most of the time have unfilled seats. It averages out to wasting far more fuel. You could argue an empty bus gets better fuel efficiency, but you are still moving a very big bus that consumes a lot of fuel!

It might be helpful if I dig up a paper I did for grad school. Data is available from many large cities, so I took the number of miles of various modes, factored in ridership, and time. I was hoping there would be environmental benefits FOR transit to support my argument, unfortunately to my disappointment that wasn't the case. People were better off saving the planet driving.

But that's looking at transit in a vacuum and many transit opponents foolishly don't look beyond this.

I revised my argument looking at the environmental benefits when transit had spatial effects on the population.

It's also important to consider costs and energy to maintain roads vs track. Asphalt is not exactly friendly for the environment and you'll be replacing tracks far less than you would a road.

So where is the tradeoff when mass transit [[rail for simplicity) becomes more energy efficient?

ETA: After thinking about this a little more it isn't entirely far-fetched. Mile for mile it may take as much or more energy to move people by train than by car, but people who travel by car tend to travel much farther than those who travel by train.