Brad Ideas - Is Green U.S. Transit a whopping myth? - Comments

People movers -- they're called legs

JimBob — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 10:49:29 -0800

The fact is that we all demand an awful lot of mobility. We want to live far from our jobs; we want the freedom to roam quickly and freely over a vast physical area during the course of our days and weeks; we don't want to walk any further than absolutely necessary, which means parking very close to our destination at all times.
Walking is an amazingly simple and efficient way to get from one place to another -- and it doesn't take as long as you'd think.

As noted it varies a great deal

brad — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 22:21:34 -0700

I do cite the national averages: 50% coal, which is not just greenhouse gas but a whole bunch of other bad stuff. 20% natural gas (fairly clean other than CO2). 20% nuke — no greenhouse gas but you have to judge for yourself what you think about its environmental consequences. 10% hydro — no greenhouse gass, but it destroys valleys and fish and other animal habitats.

It’s complex, and there is no one number. This balance does indeed shift around the country. I think actual energy used is a good number to use for national analysis, and it’s the right number to use in general systems design, because you need to design systems for all the cities.

But yes, if we move to renewable electricity, the electric transport (both cars and trains and trolleys) will score better.

Wrong metric

Jez Weston — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 19:03:00 -0700

Green doesn't mean energy efficient. If you're concerned about climate change, it means carbon efficient. If you're concerned about peak oil, it means fossil fuel efficient.
You're using a metric that's meaningless.

I'd like to see your chart redrawn to take into account carbon efficiency, not energy efficiency, because, as some other commenters have mentioned, the greenhouse gas emissions of an electric vehicle, such as a train or trolley bus, depend upon how the electricity is produced.

I'm living in a city with electric rail and electric trolley buses. 70% of the power comes from hydro, geothermal and wind. So for this city, public transport starts looking like a low-carbon way of helping people move around. Even in the US, 30% of electricity generation isn't fossil fuel.

scooters

brad — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 21:09:35 -0700

I agree that existing scooters have too high an accident rate. I am projecting a world of advanced safety systems (and eventually robotic driving) that make ultralight vehicles, notably small electric trikes, both safe and efficient.

MEDICAL costs of bikes vs cars/transit

HG — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 15:25:21 -0700

Medical injury costs and value-of-life paments make bicycles and scooters non-starters:
Bicycles are about 180 times as dangerous as cars:

Per 100 million miles traveled automobiles incur 1.41 fatalities and bicycles 250. [http://www.helmets.org/cdcstats.htm and http://www.fars.nhtsa.dot.gov/Main/index.aspx }Farming -- all that extra food the cyclist needs -- has one of the highest fatality rates of all occupations.

Injured and dead folks inur large medical costs and loose work time.
The average roadway fatality costs about $980K. Average non-fatal bicycle accident costs $220K to one million dollars.[http://bicycleuniverse.info/transpo/almanac-safety.htm]

Also Most deaths on major roads. Fifty-seven percent of bicycle deaths in 1999 occurred on major roads, and 37 percent occurred on local roads. (6) The yearly economic costs also include $61 billion in lost workplace productivity; $20.2 billion in lost household productivity; $59 billion in property damage; $32.6 billion in medical costs; and $25.6 billion in travel delay costs.(source = ? Insurance institute link broken)

I am not surprised at your blog as I as I have previously made similar calculations.

Further, I recommend that every educated mass-transit fan read their local transit authority annual report -- it's an eye opener. Then they should visit the large, classy transit administration building.

Energy Use

Sue — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 06:56:03 -0700

I'm not a brilliant person, but I do know that government oversite comes at a price: less money or less freedom. I live 20 miles from a city. I prefer to be right where I am. Mass transit is not "friendly" out here. It takes a lot of time to ride the bus when it stops every few miles. I've been trying to keep up on solutions to the oil crisis. John Hofmeister, former CEO of Shell (on Glenn Beck last week) said gas is only 20% efficient and ethanol is less. He proposes hydrogen cars. They're clean energy, emitting only water and some heat. But, he failed to mention that hydrogen is produced by coal, gas or oil, so we're back to square one. Electric cars, hmmm, they're okay tooling around town, but they don't go far before they need to be charged again. Hybrids are a possibility, the prototypes can get over 100 miles per gallon when you calculate the cost of electricity, but I don't want to "plug in" my car. I don't want battery powered cars ruining my environment. Plus, they are painfully expensive. I just want a gas powered car that can get 100 miles to the gallon. If we could do that, we would reduce our CO2's by at least half. Is that asking too much? (A rhetorical question.) There's an international competition to build a 100-mile-per-gallon car. The Automotive X Prize will have an award of at least $10 million to the team that builds the car. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that somewhere someone has the ingenuity and brilliance to create a car that is capable of rocking our world!

So, until that happens, government will want us to do our part to make sacrifices and spend hours on a train or bus, move closer to a city, limit our vacations to the closest beach, and pony up more for the cost of fuel. No more going to visit grandma down in Florida (a 1,500 mile trip). Maybe we should just start riding horses.

Yes, grids vary

brad — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:35:03 -0700

As I note, there is considerable variation in local situations, both in where power comes from and how well it is used. The west has more hydro but still has a fair bit of coal, nuke and gas. Whether nuke is green or not is a question I won’t resolve here. But the short answer is that yes, if the electricity is green, then electric vehicles are a win over fossil fuel vehicles. Especially electric cars and scooters.

DOE on crack

brad — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 16:32:36 -0700

I will presume the DOE used fairly scientific methods to get their figures. However, even if they made a major error, and it’s much lower, like 1.2 that raises the average car to about 4500, and it’s worse but largely in the same range. I suspect the DOE’s number is actually correct, but appears skewed to us because it includes the whole range of car travel, from highway road trips to solo commutes.

However, it remains true that the new generations of more efficient cars, such as the Prius and Insight, deliver better efficiency that many of the transit systems in the country, even when driven solo, and electric cars do even better, even solo, and electric scooters do vastly better, even solo.

Land use patterns are important but are not readily amenable to change in the short term. What people drive can change rapidly in the short term — people replace their car every 5 years or so. They replace their streets and parking lots every 100 years, to make a wild guess.

As for their energy methodology, as long as 50% of U.S. electricity comes from coal plants, I think it’s not an unreasonable number. Note that whatever the number is, I use the same number for electric cars and scooters as I do for electric trains, and they are the real answer, and they are better than transit with no argument needed about conversion factors.

Properly run rail system

brad — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 11:41:55 -0700

Yes, there are rail systems that just keep the trains at one end after the rush. That requires a lot of extra rolling stock and engines, though, and not all systems do that. Ditto the bus systems. They could switch to vans during the low periods, but that requires a complete set of buses for rush hour and a complete set of vans for off-peak, which again they don’t usually do.

As to what we should do, that is the hard question. Perhaps the main message of these figures is that one of the most important factors in “what should we do” is “will people use it?” You can build a beautiful transit system that’s fabulously efficient if it gets good ridership, and it can still suck if you didn’t estimate ridership properly — and transit planners are notorious at estimating ridership properly. Transit planners who get paid if transit lines are approved may have a financial bias as well.

That’s what has led me to the conclusion that taking steps to put much greener private vehicles on the road in place of the sucky ones we have today may be the best way to improve energy efficiency.

efficiency

The Overhead Wire — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 21:30:59 -0700

There are lots of issues with this analysis. First of which is saying that all cars carry 1.5 people. Hahahaha. Come on, it's more like 1.15 people per car if that. The DOE is on crack if it thinks 1.5 is normal. How many people do you know that carpool to work or drive with other people that much. That is 3 people riding in every two cars. Next time you're on the freeway look around and see how much that happens. I also find it hard to believe that trolley buses are higher energy use than diesels.

Second, is comparing cars to transit without talking more about land use even realistic if we're going to talk about being green? Cars have created a land use pattern that results in a lot of wasted energy. New Yorkers use 1/3rd of the energy that the rest of America uses. This is because of the land use patterns from the transit network there, not just the transit itself versus cars.

Using transit also means that you're not going to drive as much because you probably live in a more walkable/bikable environment. In Portland, Metro did a study in 1994 that showed compact development and good transit would push a use of 9 vehicle miles per day. In exurban Portland that number increased to 21 vehicles miles today. So even if we let your 1.5 number in cars stand, that still creates a situation where people are driving 12 more miles per day per capita. So lets be honest about what being green means in terms of transportation and not forget all the connections that occur. Looking at cars versus transit in energy alone is short sighted and misses a lot of issues that come with auto-centricity that seems like an illness in this country and is a huge WASTE of energy.

Then there is the issue of using BTU between all modes, specifically electric ones.

http://www.lightrailnow.org/facts/fa_lrt_2007-08a.htm

When considering electric

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:38:17 -0700

When considering electric vs. diesel/gasoline, it is *ludicrously* important to know how the electricity is produced.

IIRC, Australia produces almost all its electricity from coal. No wonder then that Australian diesel trains are better from a greenhouse gas perspective than electric trains.

In California or Washington state, which are almost entirely powered by hydropower, electric is far more carbon-efficient than gas.

Oh, by the way, diesel vs. gasoline: diesel is more energy-efficient and more carbon-efficient; it requires more energy (including the crude oil used) to refine a particular number of BTUs of gasoline than to refine the same number of BTUs of diesel, last I checked. Currently diesel is more expensive due to a shortage of diesel refining capacity; that should not last.

FYI, we call methane "natural gas" in the US.

I think your "crime" or

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:30:11 -0700

I think your "crime" or "respect" problem had nothing to do with mass transit.

Your problem was being in Detroit. Heck, people get carjacked in Detroit.

"Unless you can use smaller,

Nathanael Nerode — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:25:34 -0700

"Unless you can use smaller, lighter vehicles at the low demand times,"

A properly managed train system can do exactly that. As long as the low demand times can give a reasonable load for a single railcar, you put on one railcar at the lowest demand times, and more at higher demand times. One car at midnight, twelve cars at rush hour.

(This assumes the use of multiple-unit designs, and for that matter designs with fairly fast coupling and uncoupling. Locomotive-hauled designs will have energy usage somewhat less responsive to number of cars attached, though still rather responsive.)

Clearly San Jose is just being stupid if it's pulling two-car consists at all times; why not use one-car consists for the low-demand times? Seriously, why not?

In fact, a carefully designed bus system can also do this, with buses of several different sizes ranging from a minivan up to a full-sized bus, used at different times of day, but that's rather less efficient in terms of capital expenditure.

....actually, I just realized that you made an error of assumption in the essay. In a properly run rail system, those full rush hour trains are *not* running back empty: at midday, they're waiting near downtown to go back at evening rush hour; at night, they're waiting in the outskirts to go back at morning rush hour.

Bad scheduling and bad consist design can certainly render a rail system inefficient. It can do the same for a bus system very easily. Taken together, all this seems to indicate that perhaps we should spend more time and money on keeping our transit systems *good* and matching schedules and consists to demand, rather than just saying "Look, we got transit"?

When looking at 'green'ness,

Anonymous — Sat, 09 Aug 2008 20:12:13 -0700

When looking at 'green'ness, it's vital to note that California (for instance) gets something close to 80% of its electricity from renewables (mostly hydro), while Texas gets something more like 20% of its electricity from renewables.

This means that an electric train is *MUCH* greener in California than in Texas. A huge, huge difference. Apples to bananas.

This is going to make cities like San Jose look much better on a greenhouse gas basis. And in fact this difference outweighs pretty much every other number.

Anyway, those extremely low average passenger numbers simply make it clear that running an unpopular and inefficient 'mass' transit system is stupid. Mass transit is for where there's a large *mass* to transport. If the roads aren't congested, you don't need or want mass transit, from an efficiency and emissions point of view. And if the roads are congested, buses and streetcars will be very slow, and therefore unpopular and inefficient, unless they have their own right-of-ways. This leads to the conclusion that the main point of such a system, from an efficiency point of view, is to speed commuters past congested areas. Most US bus systems have zero dedicated right-of-way, and are therefore close to entirely wasted.

The Pittsburgh "LRT" is actually a piecemeal conversion of a very old set of streetcar lines. There is no doubt that it's better than shutting down the streetcar lines and driving every single streetcar user into buses or cars, since that would add a very nasty amount of congestion to Pittsburgh streets; however, the line is not on a particularly rational route for a 'core rail' line (it exists largely because of streetcar tunnels which made bus conversion difficult during the 'transit holocaust'). In other words, it *goes the wrong places*. Pittsburgh's transit agency is currently attempting to extend it so it actually connects to more than one place people want to go.

Incidentally, it's sad to see lunatics claiming that mass transit increases crime and reduces property values; this has been proven untrue a gazillion times.

If you're curious, the energy costs of maintenance and construction of asphalt roadway are generally higher per mile than those of steel railways, largely due to how fast asphalt wears out and the fact that it's basically pure oil. Although it varies depending on any number of things such as the use of concrete rail ties (much more energy-intensive than wood), different maintenance standards (a road allowed to go to pot will be more energy-efficient in construction and maintenance than a railway inspected every week, though it might well make up for it in efficiency of the vehicles using it), the steel production method for rails (recycled obviously better), whether the asphalt is hot-rolled or not, etc.

For another minor point, the degree to which rail vehicles have lost energy-efficiency over the period when cars have gained energy-efficiency is largely a US phenomenon owing to very poor regulatory choices. The Federal Railroad Administration really likes tank-like vehicles; the trend in the rest of the world is lighter, lighter, lighter.

How green is transit

Lowell Grattan — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:11:03 -0700

From Randal O'Toole CATO Institute

http://americandreamcoalition.org/ADCFS2.pdf
‘Rails won’t Save America’ 6 pages

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=9325
Does Rail Transit Save Energy or Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions?

Is Green U.S. Transit a whopping myth?

brad — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 20:11:22 -0700

As part of my research into robotic cars, I’ve been studying the energy efficiency of transit. What I found shocked me, because it turns out that in the USA, our transit systems aren’t green at all. Several of the modes, such as buses, as well as the light rail and subway systems of most towns, consume more energy per passenger-mile than cars do, when averaged out. The better cities and the better modes do beat the cars, but only by a little bit. And new generation efficient cars beat the transit almost every time, and electric scooters beat everything hands down.

I encourage you to read the more detailed essay I have prepared on whether green U.S. transit is a myth. I’ve been very surprised by what I’ve found. It includes links to the sources. To tease you, here’s the chart I have calculated on the energy efficiency of the various modes. Read on, and show me how these numbers are wrong if you can!

Note: If you want to comment on the cyclist figure, there is different thread on the fossil fuel consumption in human food which details these numbers and invites comments.